against excessive spirituality

[click image, video, half hour]

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I can't help but project that you might be delighted to contemplate for half an hour the basics of the art of freedom. If nothing else, the peacefulness and timbre of the voice will be balm for your aching nerves... or... am I projecting again that your nerves must ache as much as mine? The only downside to listening, here, is that it cuts off rather abruptly and there doesn't seem to be any continuation. So it may have suffered in the uploading or it may be all that was available. If it gets reloaded or updated, I will be sure to let you know.

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In the meantime, perhaps a meditation object...?

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The last seconds cut off at the end consist of "...which constitutes in turn, being a buddha."

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love, 99
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i'm not much into the tibetan schools

[click image, playlist]

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And especially suspicious of American lamas, but this guy's initials are LSD, so, heck, I'm girding myself for it. I gotta know what these guys are putting out there anyway....

Since I seem to be really stuck in my wide awake in the middle of the night gig, I'm going down to Crescent City for some groceries just as soon as the Friday night drunk drivers can be expected to have thinned out... which is why I'm dawdling with this playlist and post....

I'm gonna damn buy some more zinc lozenges. Night before last, for the first time in my life, I was awakened by a hard sneeze. I do NOT sneeze in my sleep, but I damn well did. I noticed then the feeling of guppies squirming around high up in my left nostril and dragged myself up for a megadose of C and a megadose of D and broke out the zinc lozenges. I got back in bed, sucking on the lozenge and fell back to sleep. I nuked myself thus all day yesterday and last night.

The serious ass cold that was going to knock me down went completely away. The dead chunks of it came out tonight and I feel swell... physically. So I'm getting more zinc to have here for next time.

I'm listening to this LSD dude while writing this, and he sounds pretty wuwu to me, but he keeps invoking Trungpa, who really DID know his stuff. I can't hang with all these so-called "teachers" yammering so much. I don't know. I'm hard to please. You get the kind who have this sickeningly fake way of pulling a deadly serious aura around themselves, and you know they're full of shit. Well, or you don't, but I do. Then you have these chatty types. At least this guy is a little more honest about his own neuroses... with a quick excuse coming on the heels of each of his confessions... sheesh.... I really wonder about people who study Buddhism and come out like this. It's as though they never GOT the part about the teaching being delusion, that it is the vehicle out of delusion, but the moment you awaken the practice has become a pose.

There would be a function for public teachers like this, but I don't see how in the United States it would be possible to set up such that a true master could hold forth to the public without turning his or her own enlightenment into a circus that deludes far more than it enlightens others. I think Trungpa, the great Trungpa, lost it from the culture shock and came to a self-inflicted bad end from the abject frustration of trying to communicate with Americans. Our single most distinguishing feature might be our heedlessness... a bad aspect of our ingrained exceptionalism. I think LSD suffers from it... but he's talking about turning the light around to help with your dreaming thing. This is a good thing for me to hear him say.

So he's not completely full of shit. The meditation he's talking about, about looking at the light behind your eyelids as they are closed, is a real thing. I've done it where I have gotten to the point where I can see my surroundings through my closed eyelids.

Right. To the store.

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You know what? Maybe I just am spending entirely too much time in the purity of my own atmosphere. It's four ayem and I just got back from a sandwich at Denny's and a stop at Safeway. It was just me, some traveler and a couple cops at Denny's. It used to be fun to sit near the cops at an all night restaurant. It isn't anymore. They're about ten times dumber than a few decades ago, and the shit they talk about is something you wouldn't believe if you were reading it in a novel. For CERTAIN you'd think it way too fake dialog... except, of course, these guys were actually saying this stuff and they were serious. I kept looking over to see if they weren't maybe grinning from having me on like that. Nope. They were heavily engaged in this weirdly clinical blather about warning some squirming cuffed guy he was going to get sprayed, or having to use the trusty old taser on some other unlucky pissed off drunk. These guys were bona fide beta males, playing tough men.

I mean, OF COURSE, why didn't they think of that earlier? If you guys get cops secure in their manhood and able to deal with people in extremis without needing to torture them into docility, they aren't going to follow your fascist dictates! They're going to be more inclined to be PEACE officers than storm troopers. They aren't going to SCARE anybody. They're going to make people feel SAFE.

Aside from the no morals, maybe the WORST of it for me was the certainty that these two thought they were speaking as though they had IQs.

Pathetic.

I wished I had some peyote to plop in their coffees.

Here, quit pretending and GET one.

And Safeway had every configuration of lozenge you could imagine—I so totally checked—EXCEPT ones with zinc in them.

Crikey!

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Down near the bottom of my sidebar, you will find a playlist for the True Hallucinations audio book. I guarantee it's not boring. In fact, you might want to buy the book after listening just a little.

True Hallucinations, subtitled "Being an Account of the Author's Extraordinary Adventures in the Devil's Paradise," is an autobiographical recounting of Terence McKenna's improbable adventures with psilocybin mushrooms in the Amazon Basin. In 1971, McKenna, along with his brother Dennis and three other companions, ventured by plane, boat, and foot to the paradisical Colombian mission town of La Chorrera, where they hoped to encounter the elusive psychedelic oo-koo-hé.

Fate would have it otherwise. Their attention soon turned to the large numbers of Stropharia cubensis that they lucked upon, and before long Terence and especially Dennis were formulating the psychopharmacological "experiment at La Chorrera" which would eventually give rise to Terence's expanded Jungian notion of the UFO as human oversoul and his I Ching based timewave theory which holds, among other things, that history as we know it is accelerating and, in fact, will come to an end sometime during the beginning of the next century (more precisely, in December of 2012, in accordance with the Mayan calendar).

Not boring. Already, I'm beginning to remember that it was Dennis who went right 'round the bend....

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BREAKING NEWS — 5:38 am, Pacific Time:

PARIS HILTON ARRESTED ON COCAINE CHARGE! OMG

That's topping the AP with big bold portraits and all. Ready to go hunt peyote buttons yet?

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Should I, like, go to bed maybe?

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interview with a space lizard researcher

[click image, video, two and a half hours]

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If you want to invest a rather large hunk of time to listen to a very well-meaning maniac, this would be your chance. I'm having to listen over again because I fell asleep after the first half hour or so of it. There are a lot of ideas about how to drop your thrall with the perfidies rendering you so helpless in here, that do make up for all the references to people and theories and spiritual ideas we have been trained to resist.

For instance, it has deepened my conviction that all the stuff about reincarnation and past lives, while off the mark, not a complete enough understanding of the sutras, the Buddhist canon, serves to open people's hearts and minds... and give them the courage to reach for true humanity.

It seems to me also that almost all of this sort of stuff—whether completely psychedelic or darn cogent or anywhere in between—is a product of the human need to make sense out of the completely inexplicably awful stuff being done by the powerful in this world... and, honestly, their explanations are almost unerringly more cogent than what's put about in the mainstream.

I'd like to point out also that this world is a conspiracy, and that it need not ever be groups of persons getting together to conspire: it works precisely as effectively wherever there are like-mentalities at work in their individual endeavors. Karma means simply "action". The vast network of actions and reactions across all works something like a mind. There are trillions of nuances to this karma business, but, loosely, and for our purposes here, the karma set up by the independent actions of people who might not even know each other can turn out to look like a perfectly planned and executed evil conspiracy... in addition to the stuff people do meet to plan and execute.
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For those of you who might be onto this subject, you might want to consider that the conspiracy of bad karma just naturally advances to the front of the herd. People who do not wish to exploit others can ONLY be the herd. The only way out of this ugly mess is for a conspiracy of good karma to overtake the lead. This requires effort—involves good people cutting themselves out of the herd—above and beyond the call. Greedy people are motivated toward the lead. Their greed gives them the energy. So wanting to live up to one's good intentions has to rise to a level analogous to a drowning person wanting air or it cannot ever take that lead from the murderating fucks.

You might want to contemplate that. You might want to think about that very, very hard.

[Hint: One cannot hook onto the energy for personal gain and be anywhere near this imperative. Another hint: This probably means you need guidance if your purpose is the good, not the personal advancement of attempting to do it. The moment you succumb to that, you are in the conspiracy of bad karma.]
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If you REALLY want to see all the way into this, spend another hour paying attention to a couple of extremely sagacious ancients. Maybe you will want to bookmark this playlist or find it on my sidebar to return to as many times as it takes to begin to sink in.

And, rest assured, our leaders have studied this stuff scrupulously. It can be used for good or ill. Luckily for us, they have only mastered the parts that serve their ill intention. Question is: Do you care enough to do the work to learn?
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blind in one eye and cannot see out of the other

[click image]

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Thought I'd snap a picture of me without contacts or glasses before I set about putting my contacts back in to see if I look all squinty like most four-eyes do without visual aids. I fear, it's worse than that. Too blind to bother squinting. I had a hell of a time finding the right thing to click to even do it.

Anyway, I thought this guy's short playlist on his homepage was kind of interesting... a different take on meditation and concentration... possibly useful information.
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UPDATE: But he closed his site and so I replaced the image link with a fellow discussing "Zen" Meditation in a little playlist. I'm not recommending the guy. You can just think about meditation better if there's SOMETHING at the image link....

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there'll probably be more, and different

[click image]

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Okay. A lot of things are weighing on my mind damn heavily lately. For quite some time I have been struggling with my urges to tell that shill yonder to stick it where the sun don’t shine. It is no longer worth it to use up so much time and energy trying to keep his blog running smoothly, keep things from going too far into the awful zone. It was way worth it when I felt it was going to help him make a difference in the too damn fashionable election fraud thing, but he, somewhere along the line, decided to settle in for the long haul instead of go supernova to make it stop, now, and that means he has all the time in the world to keep his own blog rolling along... or find someone who does not mind filling their time herding the scandalized minions while he fills every page with the mob-generating polemics that pass for American culture these days.

Not my bag.

I have news for everyone. The people on the other side—and, clue, there is no other side—are people in the identical sense as those on this side—and, clue, there is no this side—are people. We’re all people.

The critical mass superiority complex battling the right wing echo chamber is every bit as pernicious as those they battle. It’s identical, actually. They're actually battling themselves. It’s all us-versus-themming all humanity to death. What's wrong with this picture?

C'mon, you can do it....

No excuses. There are none. It’s crap. Smart people can think up and spew endless excuses. So what? So it pisses off people who are desperate for something REAL to happen to make things better... no matter what the idea of “better” might turn out to be in each head. We can’t ever get to better this way. The strongest—aka, the meanest, most energetically greedy, most singlemindedly determined—will forever turn out to feel things are better when they have their way, but the rest of us won’t. And it’s worse even than that! Once the strongest get a taste of that exalted better, they can’t stop themselves from continuing their massively destructive shit to keep heaping that better on themselves at everyone else’s expense.

This is precisely as true with “progressives” as it is with “conservatives”... with the “altruistic” as with the “selfish”... with the downtrodden as with the downtreaders... EVERYONE, high and low.

And, well, high time we cut this out, no?

Yes.

Doug Hofstadter, someone who used to bear the brunt of many of my New Year’s Day letters, brought up the concept of “jumping out of the system” a couple thousand years ago in the Pulitzer Prize winning Gödel, Esher, Bach and, even though I don’t think he ever got anything like a good grip on the basics of Zen, it was a damn Zen thing he put forth there. The book is a very hard read, but rewards one with a little cosmos of wonderful concepts, gloriously abstract, and useful for a lifetime... but... er... I digress.

When you find yourself trapped in a system that does not work, you jump out of it, look at it from outside so you can SEE what makes it unworkable and how to go about fixing that.

This seems dirt evident to me.

So, while it is also thrilling to read Doug coming up with it and playing with it, sending you off down a path more wonderful than Alice’s adventures down the rabbit hole, it is dirt evident that one must jump out of a system that doesn’t work, or only works on a level too low to satisfy the imperatives, to make that dull insufficiency stop wrecking things for everyone. Right? Oh, right? Uhm, duh? Please? Are you strapped to a full length mirror and calling that freedom? Or can you look up from the contents of your own mind long enough to get the lightbulb on and dance? Hmmm?

Try to divorce this argument from the smart/dumb axis, because looking up from this jail cell mirror thing doesn’t seem to favor smart people over dumb people. In fact, sometimes stunted intellect means there’s less of a hinderance to assimilating dirt evident stuff.

What is it about your own ideas that make them more important to you as weapons to bash others with than your basic love of living things? I mean, even the most evil fuckers of all time loved living things, no matter how many of them they slaughtered, no matter how many they squished like bugs. They couldn’t help it. Life itself loves life itself. Life itself is love. The only self you have more fundamental than your status as a living thing is your status as star stuff, which means, of course, not only do you love everyone in your very essence, but you love everything, every atom, every quark, in your very essence. You ARE every quark in your very essence. So, pfeh, this left/right, Republicrat, good/evil, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera, mode of picking up a standard to bear is just SHIT okay?

Can you stop long enough to take this in?

Can you bring yourself up short, just stop, for long enough to realize all your, say, anti-racism crap is as stupid as racism? Does that sound too nihilistic to you? It ain’t, and if you can’t hang with it, you have not stopped for that moment to take a gander at the basics.

We’re star stuff. So are rocks.

[So is Glenn Beck.]

Hating racism is as hateful as racism. Whenever you build up an us-versus-them to fight bad things, you are creating an isomorphism containing the same awfultude you flatter yourself you combat. You have to jump out of us-vs-them, this-versus-that, or you’re a bipedal exercise in futility. Period.

That’s why I use New Years’ Days to do this sort of thing. A great do-nothing day to just stop and look at actuality, remind somebody of it. I know you probably don’t come here for me to bap you over the head with Zen, use up yer eyeprints being told to stop being a jackass for a few moments, but, ahem, it’s getting dire out there and this should only take a few moments. You can get pissed at me for calling you a jackass tomorrow. For right now, just, please, shut the fuck up, and stop.

You’re supposed to be sentient. You’re supposed to be possessed of more intelligence than warring troops of chimpanzees, and this means you have to do this sort of thing from time to time. Or would you prefer the Social Darwinism we call Globalization, the Social Darwinism that already is the Third Millennium, the Social Darwinism that is melting our planet with wars and greenhouse gasses? If yer so almighty clean and righteous and progressive, then whut’s yer problem taking this in and DOING BETTER?
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sometimes the sorrow punches through to the other side

[click image]

Everyone is always trying to cope with their feelings -- fend them off, explain them, chase after them, water them down, drown them, deny them, enshrine them.... If you don't do anything to your feelings they are much more intense, no matter how intense you already think they are, and you always end up punching through this continuum of whatever emotion into the universe where its opposite obtains.

Do you realize this?

No. Of course you don't. That would mean forgetting yourself.

i sleep on my face

[click image]

It's a wonder I haven't smothered yet.

I slept long and hard last night, and I know I was dreaming big, but woke up doing my nested thinkers thing, calling my teacher's name while randomly generating words in the background. My face was ground into my pillow and that name was blasting like a shell horn with the surf blotting out any person attached to the invocation of this precious designation.

I first noticed this maybe infinite regress of voices while reading the Avatamsaka out loud.

I need to stop here and mention that while I mostly insist on the English terms for Buddhist things, "Flower Ornament Scripture" is not as generally used, "Avatamsaka" sounding so much hipper. Plus, keeping the word "scripture" out of it, I feel, is very much less misleading, much less tending toward convincing people it's religion when, truly now, it's no such a thing. So anyway, the Avatamsaka is a very good way to stifle yer inner blather and teach yourself some indispensable things.

The deal is: You read it aloud, and you DON'T slow up to try to understand what you're reading. Just like other meditations, whenever you catch yourself thinking while your mouth is carrying on thus, you just return your attention to the reading, still leaving understanding the hell out of it.

You have to turn off yer damn reading-what-you-already-think-into-everything-you-read thing. You can't learn anything beside what you already think, just with new bells and whistles, that way. We're stripping off the bells and whistles. We're filling the storehouse consciousness with stuff that doesn't impede understanding. We're ridding you of your psychosis.

So you just read aloud. The Avatamsaka is fifteen hundred pages and you just read it aloud over and over and over... daunting as the prospect seems going in. Somewhere around the third or fourth reading... or the tenth... you start actually understanding a lot of what's there, even though you never made an effort to understand it. You aren't a raving maniac anymore. You have noticed that you can make your thought read along with you, and think behind that, and turn off the thinking and make that thinker read along with you... without any effort applied ever to understand. You learn how silly what you only think truly is. You learn varying amounts of what the buddhas of the ten directions have to tell you about reality. Worried about all the charlatans out there stomping the shit out of your deepest urge to wake up? Take my advice.

It is worth the money....

calming down

Christopher Hitchens was avid to talk with me. We'd exchanged phone numbers at a party. The party was given by a fat plutocrat and his harridan wife. Both of them wanted to sleep with me. The wife was definitely out. There was a flashback to my life in an Eastern European country with knowledge of a murder, and I'd run from the murderer until I realized the only place was to hide in a coffin at his house. He came and somehow knew I was in there, and just laughed and said I would never be able to leave because he owned all the border guards. I was in there, smug in the knowledge that he didn't know I had papers in a new name and could get out as soon as he wasn't chasing me, which was right now. Then I was at my mother's house and she was telling me that a Christopher Hitchens had been calling and sounding confused. Back at the party, I'd finally consented to at least go look at the plutocrat's bedroom, but the wall between it and his wife's had been removed. She was in there naked with someone and glaring at me for turning it down, It was clear that these two party hosts were just kinky and trying to debauch the talent, not an ingenuous bone in their bodies. I was telling the horny old plutocrat to leave me out of his game when, my hero, a mysterious, wiry, chiseled and intense man very, very fit for his age appeared to whisk me away from this. He deposited me at the north end of Sausalito, where I was on a cell phone explaining to Christopher Hitchens that I'd have to call him later, and somehow truthfully but obviously preposterously told him I didn't have a cell phone and had to get to a land line for us to have our serious discussion. Then I was on my racehorse and entering the race up highway 101 in Marin from San Rafael, about to blow past the leaders of the pack, upon one of which rode Christopher Hitchens. For some reason, in this race, it was not illegal, but advisable, good strategy, to enter the race long after they'd left the starting gate. Winning was not part of it, but there was no doubt I was going to come in first.

Well. I don't have a cell phone! Or a tv. Or a Blackberry. I have an aging hotrod Mac, a thirteen-year-old roam phone, a twenty-one year-old car, mostly Energy Star appliances and all extremely-parsimonious-with-electricity light bulbs. That's as with it as a I get, but I think the point of giving him my mother's number and calling it a cell phone must have been to give him the impression that I was in the world, his world. I think calling from a cell phone I don't own and entering the race from half way through it were both about not being of the world I was in.

I think overall this was a good dream, about returning to the world my way and succeeding in it my way... which is not the way of the world... nossirreebob, it is not.

the true mind can't pierce existential terror

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You may be wondering why I've yet to update you on last night's bout with the teachings of my own true mind. It's simple. Last evening disaster struck in Goldie Honda. I threw on some clothes and grabbed my little wad of moth-eaten cash as I flew out the door to get some banking and grocery shopping done, and what to my shock but my car would not idle. It died every time I took my foot off the gas until it had warmed up enough and then provided an anemic idle and a scary clattering noise.

You may recall I was just held up in Berkeley for some days to get this esoteric part from Timbuktu to fix this problem and I had to charge a huge repair bill on my cringing credit card. This has made all trips back to the Bay Area for the next many months completely outrageously financially stupid for the next six months or so, no matter how badly I might want to go to the doctor. But now GOLDIE HONDA needs to go to the doctor. Car doctors here are as big in the imposture business as are the few masquerading as medical doctors. I am, in the vernacular, so fucked.

Everything else aside, the fantastic number of car problems over the course of my life had already pushed me to the very edge of frank psychosis every time I so much as heard a strange rattle in my car long before I finally bought Goldie and all problems ceased abruptly. I can't even remember all the cars I've owned in my life. Whether old clunkers bought used or brand new clunkers, every one of them broke down with startling regularity. I was stuck on the side of Highway One in a backless t-shirt and some barely perceptible shorts -- ONLY -- two days after purchasing a brand new MG Midget, somewhere far back in my babetude, and blessedly saved from quanta of near-rapes by a park ranger, but that's the fondest car breakdown memory I have. The thousands of others are studies in the depths of hell on earth.

Not only that, but I remember sitting in my attic apartment window, looking down on my car parked in the street, listening to Sticky Fingers on the stereo, at the ripe old age of 18, and suddenly becoming gripped with the terror of ever becoming carless. Even then, I didn't even need a roof over my head as badly as I needed my car. You can't take away my freedom of movement, my freedom to leave, or it is SO not pretty, okay?

So. I was sitting there in the driver's seat with my foot on the gas, hoping against hope I'd get an idle when it warmed up enough, and little bits of my brain were splatting against the inside of my windshield and up out of my moon roof, freaking, with a desperate need to call my mother. She's 79 years old, taking care of my rapidly-deteriorating 83-year-old father all by herself in a house too big for two of me to clean, let alone weed and mow and water the grounds, with about forty orchids to water, three maniac cats and a Yorkie to keep up, plus nary a Rotary meeting to miss on pain of permanent personal defeat, and won't let anyone come and help. Have I made the point yet that I should not be calling and whining about this to my mother? But where DO you take your existential terror if you don't have a mom who's up to it?

THAT is why they insist you're "unnatural" if you're an unmarried woman.

Check.

Anyway, I was instantaneously seized by this terror and it would not ebb. A pill didn't even mellow me out enough to get to sleep before some gawdawful hour. And I don't think I even got to the kind of sleep it takes to get dreaming done before I was awake again and, if not quite as thunderbolted, still anchored solidly in abjection. It took me until about three to work up the moxie, the adulthood, to dial the Honda Gods for advice. It didn't really solve anything, but got me a step closer to eventually resolving it... or... just failing to wake up one morning, dead of vexation and inseparable from the true mind at last.

So. I'm here to tell you, terror, if you cannot drop it, completely separates you from truth.

Get your Zen on or just suffer to death.

the stupidity of racial and religious strife

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This ties in with the Zen meditation of thinking back through the multitudes who went into making you.

So much of the horror at work in the world is based on completely asinine delusion.

the drowsy bodhisattva

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So I was dreaming of sleeping as a guest in relative's houses, and it kept waking me up, and every time I fell back to sleep, there I was sleeping through my visit with my dead great aunt, a much younger version of my mother, nearly my grandmother, but really very generically visiting relatives and continually having to explain that I was sorry I was sleeping so much. They were all oblivious, could have cared less, but I was vexed by it whenever I was awake, whether dream awake or awake awake. All very fuzzy.

If you're a Buddhist, maybe you can feel pleased that it was the guest who was so damn sleepy. I'm certainly trying to see it that way, but I'm bugged that this stuff kept waking me up and also that I kept trying to express contrition for it to all these relatives. It is great that it didn't matter a whit to any of them, but the fact that it was mildly troubling to me means to me that the guest doesn't want to sleep the rest of her life away.

Of course, that's exactly what she should do, and I want her to! If she won't just die, she should sleep.

the old girl is hobbling around

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Maybe not as elegant as optimal, but not dead yet.

I was walking through a parking lot to a bar and a very pretty married woman in a car had rolled down her window to tell me she needed some help. I said, sure, how can I help? And she told me there were some questions of sexual identity within her marriage. I said, well, I don't know about that, and kept on walking. She was very seriously put off by my apparent callousness.

A little right facing Swastika flashed up and I immediately identified it as not Nazi, but ancient Asian.

In the bar, the woman from the parking lot continued to exude hurt and angry energy toward me, but I was looking for someone, and only noted her negative energy.

Bars are figuring heavily in my dreams lately, and I'm always there to pluck someone out... actually, parking lots are too. This would be all about going into the world to save sentient beings. The matter of my efficacy is fuzzy as heck, but at least there is an effortlessness about it, a lack of disdain, an of-course-ness to all this roaming around in the stalled circus of drunken creatures of delusory notions unremitting....

I came upon the guy I wanted, and brought him out. The woman was back in her car with the window rolled down again, and I told her I was sorry I'd offended her, that there wasn't any offense meant, and what was the catch for her? Her hurt and wrath evaporated and now with an expression of agony she said, "You can't tell children everything that is in your house." I understood her immediately. She saw it, and was satisfied. Drove off.

Then I was with this drunken fellow I'd plucked out of the bar at the Zen Center where I lived many years ago, there to anoint a new Abbot from the stock of bald guys in dresses, to fill in for someone who usually performs that function. There was a piece of chocolate, a stick of licorice, and a hunk of sourdough bread on my little ceremonial tray for this procedure. The sourdough would make him poobah, so I offered him the chocolate. He knew that wouldn't work, and rejected the offering. So I gave him the licorice instead and he was satisfied. Mostly I was playing at being a bumbler because I wasn't going to give him the sourdough, but clever as he thought he was, he flunked before I had to make that plain.

Later, when the drunk had sobered, he was saying things to the Non-Abbot of the Zen Center and some woman bald guy in a dress whose hair had grown out too much. The Non-Abbot was getting angry and telling him a drunk was nobody who could tell him anything and the woman was in total solidarity with his affronted attitude toward a guy who was speaking the truth to them. I piped up to remind them that enlightening beings take the teaching from even the lowliest source, from a mentally-challenged toddler, if that's where it's coming from, and if they couldn't recognize truth from whatever source they were just a couple of quacks out to pose as some exalted form of spiritual authorities.

I said, look, I lived at this zoo for two years. I saw how many came and immediately took ownership of it, pretending they were of a rare clique, using their residence as some kind of bludgeon on newcomers, even if they'd only arrived the day before, and this trip they were pulling on their drunk teacher was no different at all from that.

Oddly, this shut them up.

Pfeh. I'll be switched. They never shut up.

comments are working, and i'm almost dead

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UPDATE THE NEXT MORNING: They made good on the blogscramble -- saved me from untold hours trying to revive and fix the broken code, put their best guy on it, and I am happy. I think they might end up with a nice stable and smoothly functioning comment system... and I hope they have changed their minds about some of their goals to turn it into a social networking thing, but what do I know? Perhaps they will end up with the best thing on the net someday soon.
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As you may or may not be able to notice, the agony of getting the JS-Kit guys to yank their heavily misfiring beta commenting system off my blog for me -- since there was literally NO way for me to do it -- has ruined some special formatting code done for me years ago by a friend who is no longer with us. I don't know if I can figure out how to rectify that, and this whole process has brought up so many memories of so much travail and almost everything I hate about this world that I truly feel as though I have been beaten to within an inch of my life.

I'm going to try to pull myself together and put on my ultra-powerful drugstore cheaters, the ones I had to get contact lenses in order to find, and spend quantum hours looking for what might put the situation right in my blog template.

So if I don't seem anything like my usual self for a day or two or week, and if you click in to find the place looking extremely strange, for however long, please, bear with me.

I know I left my Zen around here somewhere. Maybe the drugstore cheaters will help me with that.

No, really, it's around here somewhere because I distinctly recall swearing off swearing until I turn back into a person who even realizes she's swearing when she swears, a person who swears when she intends to swear. I don't know when I became one of those people who can't hear her own foul mouth, but it seems I did. I just instated this clean language thing a couple days ago, and almost immediately found a comment, where I'd been certain of 100% clean usage, with a big blaring "fucking" right in the middle of it, big as heck. So the problem is not trivial. Luckily, I had the edit function, and could rip that sucker out the moment I realized it was there, but, well, it had taken a few hours to realize it was there! So it is the Zen made me swear off swearing until I only swear intentionally, and this is how I'm certain it's around.

Believe me, I have to find it. My laser brain has turned into a firefly brain behind this.

No kidding. And do please see the update on my commenting policy.

i'm not happy with the president at all, at all

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I know I shoulda been on this a couple days ago, but the comment thing was filling me with so much rage I couldn't look at the rest of the world, or care. That's the thing about wrath. You have to let it flow out somehow so your real mind can still deal with the real. Just sometimes there's too much for those still working through their stupid lifetime habit energy.

dreadful decay of dharma

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You do not burn yourself alive over not being allowed to perform a stupid ceremony. You do not give your life for religion. You give yourself in defense of life, to ease the suffering of sentient beings. That was just stupid, and the whole bit about Buddhism being made into a religion is just stupid. The dharma is there to impart a specific message, it's the key to understanding reality, NOT a fucking religion. Motherfucking stupid willfully ignorant fountains of false piety drove that poor kid to martyr himself for NOTHING, for zero, zilch, nada, bukes!

Fuck!

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And, well, ya know, I have to get up from this cussedly inferior machine betimes, missing out on a lot of my usual rounds, and went off in service to the ever-demanding rulers of this roost... the cats. Doors must be opened, and cans of food. The punishment is dire and unrelenting if you don't perform. So I was out with a cigarette just behind the eaves drips, the cutoff between dry and very wet, thinking about the documentary I watched years ago with the stupid and pathetic Tibetan nuns telling of being outcast and worthless and as good as dead from having been raped by Chinese soldiers in their efforts to obliterate the Tibetan religion. You can't obliterate the dharma. You can rape it ceaselessly and it doesn't lose its adamantine incandescence. If a Buddhist nun could be stripped of her nuntude for having been raped, she was never a Buddhist nun, or those who conferred this distinction on her weren't Buddhists, just bald guys in dresses.

Then my mind traced over what I was trying to say to Trish about homosexuality, about sexuality in general, in America, and never seem to be able to find the right words to express what I mean. I am for human rights and for anyone who wants to get married being able to get married, but I don't exactly approve either. It isn't just homosexuality, it's sexuality in some of the forms it takes. Many homosexuals insist they are only able to emotionally bond with a member of their own sex, and I doubt that is true for some and believe it is true for many. Whatever. It's their right in any case, but I have had too many gay men tell me they chose to be gay because women are just too much work, too demanding of the kind of attention they are unwilling to give. Too many lesbian couples have very frankly confessed to me they are together because men are too brutal or unfeeling and too much work, whereas they can have a fulfilling relationship with each other and just forget all that trouble over men.

And guess what? Lots of heterosexual encounters, of whatever duration, are as bereft of emotional or spiritual attachment as these homosexual unions of convenience. They are all about on a par with rape... minus maybe the hatred and violence of intent.

I say you never have sex with someone you're not willing to be there for until you die... and not the kind where you only think that because you are besotted, but the kind where you know that because you know who you are. This horrifies people. I'm not even talking getting married, before or after. Real love-making is itself marriage. And I'm not even saying it has to be only with one person. But they are still horrified. They think I must not like sex, or I've turned into a censorious old prude. "It's natural. It's a basic animal instinct. It's as much a necessity of living as eating and pooping and breathing. It's beautiful." Et cetera, et cetera, et cetera.

Then when I tell them there is intimacy far more gratifying than sex and more naked without ever disrobing, they really go batshit on me.

I have to say, too, that if you have been raped, get over it. It is one of the most horrible experiences there are on earth. It fills you with shame that seems to bubble up relentlessly from the center of the earth. The nightmares are unspeakably cruel. There really is so little worse than rape, but... GET. OVER. IT. The truth is: nothing has been harmed that you are unable to repair. Do the work. Repair. You hold on to that horrific victimization, all you are doing is violence to everyone in your life by that means... making everyone in your life feel the pain of your rape, and feel the oppression and frustration of dealing with all your excuses based on it. Get over it.

I'm pointing to a world far more lovely and lovable than the one we live in and one where people don't go around raping, with or without mutual concent, each other in the name of natural instincts, a world where young people are not misled to think that the mere means of preparing their minds for an important realization is so sacred in itself that they burn themselves alive, or get shot to death for trying to.

Still... fuck.

[You think my language is coarse? I think your world is coarse.]

in but not of

I was making a bed on the floor of my aunt's house, and it kept increasing from very humble to getting on toward a darn opulent sort of sleeping arrangement. My mom and aunt were coming and going, getting ready for some big deal, sort of in their Christmas dinner mode, but it wasn't that. Then I was out in the yard, and Sarah Palin showed up for this shindig. She had jet black hair and the face and body of a hag, but she was acting as though she were the attraction for the event. I went in and told my mom and aunt that she had arrived and whether or not that was some sort of a mistake, I was splitting. Suburbia turned into the city as I stormed down its homeless-lined streets. Someone was becoming violent toward me. So I ducked down an ally toward a finger of suburbia. At the edge of it, a path ahead across an embankment would take me back to my aunt's neighborhood, stood, or barely stood, a funky old trailer with trash in the yard and an angry bigot acting as though he'd wanted to murder me his whole life ran for his rifle. I started a run for the path, got caught in that age-old bit where I wanted to run but was paralyzed, and willed myself out of it and down the path. The bullets were zinging past me, and I was having great difficulty getting away, but get away I did.

I found myself back on the city streets, though, with Nick Mason, Rick Wright and Dave Gilmour. I was telling them of my ordeal. They were appalled and expressing their relief that I'd come through. We pretty much agreed that the Sarah ogre had been as dangerous as the people trying to shoot me. Hours collapsed into seconds and Nick and Rick were gone, but David and I and his mother were on a cable car together. His mom sat next to him across from me, and she was griping about how he'd had all this success and done all these great things and never married. He was saying that he'd never felt the need, he'd made a lot of money, was quite comfortable and... and couldn't finish the sentence because three gorgeous young things were instantly on him, fawning over him. He rid himself of them by pulling me across into his lap, the face-to-face kind of into his lap, and our arms and legs were going around each other, ever closer, and his mother was getting happier by the nanosecond... when a lady with a high-pitched voice in my back bathroom called to me and woke me up.

There of course was no lady in my back bathroom, but she'd woken me up anyway, just in time to break my heart, and just in time to hear the heater kick on.... I forgot to turn it off before bed last night. Maybe the lady was the heater making some noise in complaint in the cold, like when the phone is ringing and I'm dreaming someone's yelling "peanut butter" insistently at me... or maybe she was my ego resisting death for the quadrillionth time. I hate her.

what went wrong with chögyam trungpa

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I'm remembering a friend pitching a fit about Trungpa's supposed enlightenment and his death from alcoholism. I don't think I did such a good job of explaining it to him, but Trungpa most certainly did know what he was talking about, and his impulse to drop the trappings of Buddhism and speak to Westerners in terms we could understand was pristine.

I don't fault him for wanting to shock us, insult our prissy little ideas about what constitutes a master. I think he wasn't prepared enough for the culture shock when he embarked on this project. He was in Tibet until he was twenty, and we're talking during its complete removal from the rest of this world, before the Chinese invaded. Then he was in India for another four or five years... still in complete innocence of the perfidies of Western sophistication. Then people who want to wear exotic religions like designer clothes began fawning all over him, paving the way for him to become powerful here, before he even had a chance to get the lay of the land, so to speak. He found himself in charge, before he even knew what he was in charge of.

Then, too, I think he didn't know that many Asians have as much trouble with booze as indians do. This would have been no part of his intensive study in Tibet. And we are not speaking of something as easy as just stopping drinking. That is frequently lethal, and I'm thinking he well may have been determined to apply his spiritual mastery to the problem rather than plain old allopathic medicine.

In short, he was still heavily under the influence of the testosterone poisoning of young adulthood when he took us on, not completely clear of the hurdles, unable to know the dimensions of the hurdles he was not yet clear of, and too cocky to realize his errors until they owned him. By the time he may have been coming wise to the realities of these traps, and ergo the imperfect state of his own enlightenment, it was too late. Nevertheless, it is unwise to ignore his teaching because he fucked up in the end. It is apparent he'd had benefit of enlightened guidance, and that he'd understood. He knew what he was saying, even when drunk out of his skull.

[A number of hour-long lecture mp3's are linked here, but I do not recommend you listen to any of the others at the link, and I don't even think you can get much from the Trungpa lectures either. It seems to me that his best medium was print. I particularly recommend The Myth of Freedom for beginners. The second half of the book doesn't start making sense until you get much more deeply into it, but the first half is really very valuable to beginners.]

it's not a religion

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i'm doing it again, while watching again

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I mean, if you actually break down and watch this two-hour addendum to the original Zeitgeist, you're not only going to understand our current economic meltdown much better, but you will understand about my love for Hugo Chavez and Rafael Correa and Fidel Castro and all heroes of their ilk. The guy who makes these films, Peter Joseph, is without any doubt hurtling toward complete, perfect, enlightenment. Do it! Do it! Do it!

I even downloaded it to my hard drive... just in case I want to bring people here and make them watch.

all of them to the other side

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I walk around in this really dazed state, where it feels as though I'm moving through a much thicker medium than air, until I'm allowed to get my REM sleep. Couldn't face trying to deal with the store in that condition, so I stripped and dove to my little mattress here in the basement, and, yipes! I had a two-hour nap, full of dreams.

It is the ancestral home so much of the time, even if it doesn't look exactly right, it's the place we lived in the longest as I was growing up. This time there was a very rickety rope bridge leading to and from it. I was leading a bunch of... well... let's just say people who needed leading across it, away from the house, to meet some threat or other that needed to be neutralized. I did that, and then turned back alone. I was thinking how odd it was that the rickety old bridge never seemed to get so rickety it didn't work, or that someone kept it at the proper functionality to confidently be able to traverse it, even though the pitfalls were fairly consequential.

But then I was out in the commercial world with a bunch of very, very elegant and petty ladies. I was not the leader. More like a gaping tourist, but I think there was an element of me being supposed to lead them somewhere. The problem was getting them to stop being sidetracked by such petty things. Two of them became embroiled in a duel of sarcasm over a lost item, and we were striding in our high heels down a breezeway lined with seats the whole time this spat was progressing. Finally, we stopped and one grabbed something off the chair where evidently they had been seated earlier. It was a digital camera belonging to the other, and it fit inside a perfume bottle case. She kept clicking pictures in a circle and each snap would release a burst of perfume. I woke up when a spritz blasted me in the face.

So now let's see if I can figure the rest of this day out before midnight. Maybe I'll answer Babs about transportation....