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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didn't we just fall back last week?

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Yer telling me I gotta Spring Forward tonight or be all worse discombobulated tomorrow? Could we consider returning me to my home planet instead? Am I getting old? Whut?

I've got stuff going on here that, believe it or not, for once, I don't much feel like discussing, but in the midst of my thinkings and doings and explorations I find this Chinese lay Zen master, teacher, old dude, and notwithstanding his having been damned with faint praise by Thomas Cleary—There is no question that Master Nan’s work is a cut above anything else available from modern authors, either academic or sectarian, and I would like to see his work gain its rightful place in the English speaking world.—I'm not getting the right feeling from this encounter with evidence of his existence. I even think I've read one of his books and not been grabbed.... There could be a couple thousand reasons for this and I may see them or just forget any significance to coming across him again at this moment of vexation and deal with it some other how. I don't know.

I'm going to practice NOT getting into a sweat over it one way or another....

Have I mentioned lately that if you are interested in Zen and reading anything by anyone beside Thomas or J.C. Cleary, yer taking way too big a chance with your whole life? I know I must've before, but, well, it bears repeating ad infinitum....

There are others I could sort of recommend, would recommend if I had you right in front of me to insert the proper amount of qualifiers and list pitfalls for you, but I can't have you right in front of me, and, truly, there's enough stuff by and translated by the Cleary brothers to keep you busy for the rest of time anyway. In fact, I'd like to be powerful enough to call them both up out of the soup this very now to come smack me around a little, put me back into shape.... I know I oughta be grateful enough for their spectacular work that is piled up all around me, but, well, most of the time I am. Just this very now it seems not enough somehow.

I have been learning in my time on the tubes that HEARING is what gets it in here. This may be because I damn well need a guide dog to drive me to town, but I never noticed it before. I have noticed that I am STUPIDLY sensitive to annoying sounds, and have—DEAF—friends who think I'm a damn maniac for flipping so hard over stuff they don't even notice, but there you have it. It seems to work the best if I hear it while I'm doodling or mindlessly playing computer solitaire or darning or embroidering or SMOKING AND SIPPING DEPRESSO.* I'm thinking that it's about keeping the other senses and my yammering ideas at bay while soaking in the good stuff.

I have a PROBLEM. Something has popped up in the last day or two that has been trying to pop up for quite some time and it is egregiously not kosher.... I'm not flipping. But I am vexed by it big time and don't know which trick to use on it.... So I'm building psychic rooms in which to return to my hermitage, see if I can't be here and a hermit at the same time... or keep me busy until my hand falls on the right volume to help me with this. It's a BIG problem. It seems on its face like a monstrous regression, but it feels more like a new clarity... only not in any way as happy as I've ever found clarity to be, and I have always loved clarity to bits, even when I have to be clear on stuff I outright hate. This one may be big.

Oh, sorry to be thinking obliquely out loud on you here. I'll shut up now. Sorry.
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* Long ago and far away I had a Venetian lover who cooked like God, did marvelous things for and to and with me, and made sure I never lacked for cups of "depresso". If his Martian roots had not finally started showing, I might have married him and never been swept off my feet by 86... and then... how very, very much else would be how many googolplexes of kalpas different around here? OMG
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reading material for fried secret agents

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You probably can't tell, but I've been pretty damn serious about Zen for decades. I have read and reread many times whatever I can find from the ancients in English that I can tell hasn't been mutilated by the deluded in the process of translation. I think I own every book translated by Thomas Cleary, and I am even gathering myself to go into more depth on strategy and the deeper aspects of the martial arts. I need my strength back and it comes from these things.

Just owning the books is a sort of comfort and protection. Being in the room with them. Opening even one, even just uncomprehendingly letting one's gaze fall on a random page. Or mustering the will to shut the pie hole of your computational mind while you write over it by reading these aloud to it. Whatever level of absorption and proximity, it only piles on more truth and strips away the ripping claws of delusion to do this.

And it corrects errors. Opens limitlessness. Encourages positive energy. Saves sentient beings.

I'm close to completely ground to a halt by the outrages of this modern mess and need to be in my stacks of ancients again.

rational zen

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There is an essay in this book, translated into English by the only contemporary human with the knowledge and the depth of understanding to touch the work of Eihei Dogen, wherein Zen Master Dogen says, "Stop doing and perform." This essay, let alone this line from it, has driven countless charlatan Zen teachers into the rafters with their inability to grasp the hem of its meaning. Even after long study, that essay turned my brain into knots, but I had been practicing reading masters without using the chattering of my left brain [see Jill Bolte Taylor behind the electric blue image in my sidebar] butting in, and so resolved to reread that puppy in a manner that would permit me to glimpse the sublime meaning there.

As I did so, I marked the corresponding Translator's Notes so I could flip back and forth between passages of Dogen and Cleary's helpful restatement, explanation, added background. I did this two or three times, and then I went back to reading the thing straight from Dogen. I think I've read that essay seven or eight times now... and it's time for me to do it again... when I can get back to my library from this latest adventure. I think it is one of the most trenchant bits of wisdom ever set down for posterity, no matter how difficult it is to understand, no matter how many miracles of karma had to converge to bring it into a form I could understand if I worked hard enough. I'm trying to think of anything else in my life that was worth that much work to fathom.

Most of what is written -- on the internet, in newspapers, in books, wherever -- is not worth the work to finish even a few lines [which is not to say that the thick-witted shouldn't keep at it for a hope of understanding the world], except of course for its entertainment value. The internet is a fabulous learning tool, and a boon for the profession of referencing... for users managing to cull the blather to get, often, to the straight dope, but it is also a kind of cosmic tent under which millions dart frantically through the tubes, pinging the planet in feverish tilts all the day and night... doing their little left brains to crisps, not performing, not manifesting even so much as an atom of positive intent... pure, stressful, entertainment. Is it worth it?

Could we learn to call it "entertainment" so as not to confuse ourselves about our obsessive doing being the actual performance of beneficial things? not to confuse others that it is the manifestation of our positive intent?

From the bodhisattva Kṣitigarbha: "What do you call the world?"

When you call things what they fundamentally are not, you are trapped in a stuffy little coffin of delusion, even if you happen to be a world famous journalist who globe trots for pay. Unfortunately, this stultifying state of affairs is not then limited only to just that one erroneous namer of things, but also to everyone who subscribes to that nomenclature, and to everyone who is affected by that nomenclature. For instance: the citizens of Iraq, or, say, the homeless here, or the starving everywhere. You get my drift. It's moot that the naming of stuff is NEVER any part of the stuff named. That's for people who want to devote their lives to enlightening being. Let's just keep it on the terms suffering sentient beings can use.

You call setting out your opinion, or your reasoning for wanting what you want, for yourself or for the world, "action" and this world is as it is. You call an invasion of a country for oil the "Global War on Terror" and this world is as it is. Look around you. Do you begin to get the idea that not jailing the perps for the mere use of that term was a BIG mistake? Or did you have that idea right away and then spend the intervening years on the other side of the delusion coffin, calling your opinions about this "opposition"?

i am the love child of marilyn monroe, zhaozhou and crazy horse koan

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Maybe a famous Zen koan will help. We're talking maybe the most high-minded Zen masters in history, here, and they had a whole monastery full of sincere students. Mandatory though it may be, sincerity also turns out to be the biggest stumbling block to enlightenment, so...

From Thomas Cleary's translation of the Wumenguan:

Because the monks of the eastern and western halls were fighting over a cat, Master Nanchuan picked it up, and said, "If you can speak, I'll spare the cat. If not, I'll kill it."

No one replied, so Nanchuan killed it.

That evening Zhaozhou returned from somewhere else and Nanchuan told him what had happened. Zhaozhou then took off his sandals, put them on his head, and walked out.

Nanchuan said, "Had you been there, you could have saved the cat."

From the translator's comments:

Zhaozhou's farcical act silently remarks that to be enslaved by something that originally was supposed to foster liberation is like being worn by a pair of shoes instead of wearing them.

Nanchuan says that Zhaozhou would have saved the cat, because this is the very point he was trying to make to the disputatious monks: Ride the vehicle, don't be ridden by it. To ride the vehicle of Buddhism means to transcend human greed, aggression and stupidity. To be ridden by the vehicle of Buddhism means to become pompous about piety -- when you let ordinary human desire or ambition for spirituality or enlightenment increase the burden of your self-importance.

For some reason, I've been cracked for Zhaozhou since the first time I heard of him.

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Same with Crazy Horse. For exceptionally similar reasons.

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And Marilyn... well... use your imagination!

* is authorized to attack iran and a stab at the art of war for peaceniks

Mark Crispin Miller hosted Scott Ritter recently to discuss his new book, Waging Peace, and the event can be seen here. Ritter goes like a bull in a china shop into a bunch of bright ideas and good points for a successful peace movement. He says his book is based on Sun Tzu's Art of War. Maybe, but not with much understanding. You would do far better to read Thomas Cleary's translation, which was undertaken at all expressly to show its use for the peaceful, than Ritter's attempt at showing its use for the pissed-off. Still there are some extremely important things being discussed in this hour and a half, so I wish you would remember your civic duty and listen.