"Can a mortal being with his limited consciousness have an insight into a field without its ken? No; as long as he relies solely upon his intellectual faculty, he is forever barred from so doing. For the intellect is really superficial and cannot penetrate through spatial and temporal relations, nor can she free herself from the bondage of logical sequence.; and therefore the inner life of our being us alogether unknown to the intellect. We cannot be said to know an object thoroughly by merely becoming familiar with all its attributes, qualities, potentialities, and what not. All these can be understood through the senses and the reasoning faculty. There yet remains a certain feature of the object, the knowledge of which alone completes the understanding of it. Philosophy and science have done a great deal for the advancement of our knowledge of the universe, and there is a fair prospect of further service to this end. But they are constitutionally incapable of giving rest, bliss, joy, and faith to the a troubled spirit; for they do not provide us with a complete knowledge of existence, and are unable to lay bare the secrets of life. What they teach concerns the shell and husk of reality. In order to satisfy fully our religious yearnings we must not stop short at this; we must appeal to a different faculty, which will reveal to us the inmost life of the universe.
Fortunately, we are possession of this peculiar faculty which might be called the religious sense, and through the exercise of which we come to realize the significance of our existence. How unbearable life would be, if we were not allowed to have this religious faculty and yet we had to raise those spirit-harassing questions which could not be solved by logic!
The faculty seems to have all the essential characteristics of the feeling. It is intuitive and does not analyze; it is direct and refuses a medium of any form. It allows no argument, it merely states, and its statement is absolute. What it says "yes," the affirmation has such a convincing force as to remove all doubts, and even skeptically disposed intellectual minds have to admit it as a fact and not a whim. It speaks as one with authority. True, it has only a subjective value, which, however, is just as ultimate and actual as sense-perception. Being immediate, there is no other way to test its validity than that each experience it personally, individually, and inwardly. The sun is risen on the horizon and all that have eyes see it and harbor not the shadow of a doubt as to its presence there. The inner sense which I have called religious faculty makes us feel the inmost life that is running through every vein and every artery of nature; and we are completely free of skepticism, unrest, dissatisfaction, and vexation of spirit. We never try to raise a doubr about the true nature of the feeling and ask ourselves whether it is merely a phenomenon of mental aberration or due to a calenture of the brain. We simply feel, and nothing more or less is to be asserted or denied. And this is what constitutes spiritual enlightenment."
- From "Spiritual Enlightenment" in Zen for Americans - Writings by Zen Master Soyen Shaku

I find myself in this kind of Talmudic Socratic mindfuck that makes blogging, or generally expressing myself all the harder. When I place my fingers to keys or I open my mouth, I find my questions to the questions coming up lacking, and my deficiencies of wisdom totally naked like the Emperor with no clothes. It's hard to accept that there is so much I know, and so little I really understand. Thinking and processing has become like that non-lethal anti-riot foam being developed that the more someone sprayed with it fights against it, the more resistant the foam becomes. I keep trying to find some means of expressing where I am, but it all comes out in the same old intellectual reference, lacking in the feeling that could endow meaning, making my life more than some intensive logic struggle. I distrust my current "emotional" expressions, because they are more like cold thought built into a construct of maddenly complicated order trying to mirror the rational chaos that are human feelings. It's like playing the flip card of the direction American culture is taking where so many try to make the intensely and personally irrational become reality through the appearance of irrationality. There is this old joke that neurotic build castles in the air, and complain about the floorplan without ever moving in. As if the ferocious defense of nothing at all, magically makes it into everything. Least one thing that I believed from my early adult days remains truthful to me, that insanity is just sanity reordered to a new reality. And that made me proudly insane. But then the truly insane believe themselves to be sane, so I guess now I'm just unorderly to those who presume order. I can handle that. But it would be nice if I felt the bliss of it. I guess the saga continues... after this break from our sponsors.

I’ve had a day that has been a philosophical lesson in impermanence, taught by being screwed by work and by managing to screw my wireless card up in the same day. (This is written on Word, and hopefully I will network it off my laptop onto my desktop.) It has to be a lesson in something, or else my head would have exploded by now. Its days like this that make me wish I believed in a higher power, simply so I could raise my fist to the skies and curse blasphemously at Him/Her/It. Least I still got my German beer. The tradition continues. But this is clearly a more humanist lesson in getting too damn cocky about regularity of life. So the timing is somehow, even if coincidentally, perfect. If my personal discomfort levels were high before, now they rank somewhere around being lit on fire while laying on a bed of nails. Damn my disbelief in providence. It could be so damn useful right now. It’s funny how I can imagine that some of certain faiths and other mystic followings would probably point to a day like this as proof of the displeasure in ignoring the Big Banana of their choice. But all is vanity. Hard to imagine that some divine being someplace is spending his/her/its quality time away from the music of the spheres to just make sure some shmuck working security gets shafted for not falling in line. Makes God sound like the abusive father whose children get the false freedom based only on how long they can go between beatings. Still, anyway, and through whatever (ir)rational means, today can do nothing but truly suck.
I have made a decision, that my last name does not mean Forest Man in German, but that is some coverup to hide the true meaning of my family name: Those who eat crisis (and ask for seconds.) I was on the bus on the way to this fine tavern when I realized that I felt strangely pleased. Here was a nice mundane crisis that I could serve to myself, with a side of deep-fried guilt, that I could really sink my teeth into. None of this existentialist bullshit. Job problems! That’s the ticket!
Unfortunately, I doubt I will be able to divert myself from this shifting redefinition of who I am, and what I believe, by getting angry at my supervisor. In fact, this new difficulty only presses my desire to not get tossed around so much by life, and roll with the proverbial punches.
Okay, that’s it, I’m done writing for now. Hitting the wall of tired cliché, and that means I’m ready to romp in the flowering field of false self-actualization. I will finish my beer, and I will go home, and I will play with my rats.
(Note: This was published off the now mysteriously working again wireless card. Oh the vagaries of technology.)

I've definitely been feeling oddly as of late, but odd in a good way. Actually, I've discovered the solution to all my spiritual problems, now that I am channeling Ogugmug Alpha-Nine, a Crab Nebulan Space Centurion who was stationed on Mu. Together we plan to build a geodesic retreat in the Washington woods where I will reveal angelic teachings of theta-wave psychic sphincter control and prophecize that when the Big One comes to the Pacific coast, unexpectedly the rest of the country will sink into the ocean.
Yeah, right. As if. But hey, I do envy those who can make it as New Age wingnuts, whose material lives are stripped of spiritual meaning can turn in comfort to the coming of strange wise beings from beyond the beyondness, and a future of peace, love, and psychic levitation. Nice to be able to really believe in a properly convoluted mythos for a utterly confusing time. But no such luck. Any higher alien intelligence worth his intergalatic salt would avoid this crazy planet, whose lifeforms are too underripe or overly fermented. And poor angels, once the brilliant and terrible beings of heavenly fire and light, now being represented as Hallmark agents sent to teach people who need heavenly help to wipe their own asses.
But..... I digress.
Few days ago, I noticed that I was standing alittle straighter, and I was interacting with people easier; I was even keeping eye contact. After chasing my own metaphysical tail, so to speak, I've found that in the quiet, I've gained a new subtle lucidity. The hard part is not taking it and spinning an intellectual fable to overblow the importance and basically drive it into the ground. The other night, the house Libertarian, was watching me make my lunch for the next day, and commented that I was funny. I asked why and his response was weirdly enlightening, that he'd never met anyone who talked to himself as much as I do. I gave him the usual excuse about how long I'd lived alone, and how much I like to keep myself entertained, but later on, I realized even I didn't believe that. On reflection, I've noticed since the crisis boiled down, I have been talking to myself even more than usual, but not in the same way, the old way being more a mix of pure nonsense and bitter self-argumentation. What I was saying was what I was thinking. Hard to convey the impact of that. So I hushed myself, and that voice that was me was loud and clear, and it didn't use the pronoun, "you" but "I." This is a really big deal, and I wish I could explain why, but I can't. Maybe it doesn't need to mean anything but to me. Something has changed. I guess it's my overdeveloped sense of personal drama that makes me expect that the ground should quake and thunder should roll from the heavens when understanding comes into my awareness, but that is religious leftovers too. Now looking back on pivotal experiences I've had in my spiritual development, most of it has been inadvertently started, and simply manifest, and only afterwards did I feel this powerful need to clothe it in mystic and intellectual verbosity.
Even right now, as I write this, I know I am failing to follow my own heresies, because how I am writing this still feels like I am trying to lecture the invisible college, and thereby externally convince myself that my ideas are right, and endow myself with faith in them. This is so much dogma, really. Not that far from the reason that evangelicals need to proselytize, to create laws , and interject "loving" hate. Much of the time, you'll find that they are covering for the doubt that they may have, but don't want to believe they have. Reality as a one-way street.
The hardest part is the feeling that has driven me to explore Buddhism lately, that so much of this is the growing entropy caused by my reliance on intellect alone. Like building a turkey from matzoh meal, it only looks like the real thing, and only part of the time. I'm considering a call to a local Buddhist temple or center, not because I want to become a Buddhist, but because I would like to ask someone who is really there, about the duality of being, and its inherent failure.
I'm still probably better off with the geodesic retreat and the biblical mantra..
The saga continues...

Hey-ho, mighty and turbulent is the life of the heretic. Least, this last week's absence can be counted as a sign of my true heretical nature. Defining heresy personally, I believe that it isn't just undermining established cultural and religious dogma, it is being able to undermine your own personal dogma. And baby, if holding to any doctrine was a full measure of priesthood, we'd have me as Pope Irving the First by now. Dealing with sapping my own security, I ran into a very old psychical wall of my powerful inner defenses, and blew out a gasket in the attempt. As the Buddhists might say, I reached the upper limit of my intellectual energies, and like a badpenny fuse, I snapped over by relying wholly on that single circuit. I'm hoping that some time in the future, I won't need to have these periods be so brutal, but what you can't accomplish with an application of a ball peen hammer, you will surely do with a seven floor drop of a Baby Grand piano. The post-blowout is even harder in some ways, because it is damnably hard to incorporate what comes from the onto-eruption, and even harder to explain to someone else where I am. Hell with it. I don't care what anyone else says, doubt is good for the soul. (well, it would be if I didn't doubt the existence of a soul.)

More to come.

Main Entry: her·e·tic
Pronunciation: 'her-&-"tik
Function: noun1 : a dissenter from established church dogma; especially : a baptized member of the Roman Catholic Church who disavows a revealed truth
2 : one who dissents from an accepted belief or doctrine :
NONCONFORMIST

-from Merriam-Webster dictionary online (italics added by me.)

3 hours since I left work, convinced I would go home, and here I am at my second coffeehouse and still in my embarrassingly polyester workpants. I burnt through my spare battery (I’m plugged in here) just writing my angst-ridden soul out on my blog and then forgetting that I was offline or something so that I lost everything I had disgorged on the page. Now I can’t properly connect to Blogger and I’m working off Word, and eating an overpriced grilled cheese sandwich. I should be deeply pissed about losing that entry, but I’m not. Still, I wrote some meaningful stuff there that explained a lot of how I am thinking right now, but the problem is that I was writing how I am thinking now. The meaning ended up being wrapped in a combo of ornately worded pap and over-stylized preaching. Still trying to be the heretic convincing others of how good his apostasy is, as a means to support his dogma.
But I will sum up the really good ideas that I worked on in the lost entry. Actually, it’s just one, really. Doesn’t take more than one to make me wander aimlessly around in my workpants. And it is this:
True heresy is an act of spiritual anarchy. Spiritual act is an act of one who answers to no higher authority and who is undivided inside himself.
Going to leave it at that for now… I can tell I’ll just grind the idea into the ground if I try to explain it again. I think I will walk again.


“There is no authority but yourself.” Sticker posted over my desktop monitor, found at one of the Bay Area Anarchist Bookfairs.


Oh hey... Blogger is back up. So here is the stuff. Something tells me I won't be home for awhile anyway. But I should change my pants.

I'm pretty sure that German beer is probably not the panacea for my disorder of my soul, but then alcoholic lubrication has always been a solid choice of angst-ridden cerebral set. For my friend, Jim the Younger, it has been a lifestyle choice, or least a meritorious aim to join the Golden Joyce Circle of the Underappreciated Literary Lush. Probably this is my highbrow excuse for getting out of the house and becoming as three sheets to the wind. Closest guess would be therapy for a long week, much of it being a bad time to be a gay Jewish humanist. I am so up against the wall with the blindfold and cigarette within a decade or less at this rate. Personally, I don't want to become a martyr to the cause because being dead sucks alot, and makes it hard to appreciate anything profound. This has always been my problem with dying well. The dying part. What was it that Woody Allen once said? "I'm not afraid to die, I just don't want to be there when it happens."
I should accept the state of the world as proof of the theory I've placed my faith upon, based on my understanding of history, that conservatism becomes zealotry in the face of the time before a paradigm shift. If you listen to alot of real "Islamists" talking about the battle between militant and moderate Islam, they say that the militancy is actually not so strong as it is desperate to hold onto the ground it is losing to an adaptive moderate change. It may be like pailing out the ocean by the bucketful to prevent an impending tsunami, but for right now, long as some see that water is inside the pail and being emptied from the ocean, they'll believe that they are affecting sea levels. My direct relation is that my struggle now is very close to an essential part of the human struggle, the conflict between those who fear change they see as inevitable, and those who are willing to do anything to not even face the fear of change that is inevitable. I used to believe I was a square peg trying to fit in a round hole, and I still am; but the world is mostly an octagonal peg trying to fitting into a square hole. It doesn't make at any easier to live right now, but least it makes it less elitist. It's the old paradigm that still leaves that with that sublime legacy that "we are smart and they are dumb" belief, when they simply managed to slot into the system created so that they don't have to think or know, and we are the refuse of that system. Order must be maintained, and we are bad for order. Even from those who think themselves "rebels" find offense in freethinkers at time, because rebellion is sublimination into itself to the system in an reflective interaction, like how LeVay's Satanism is just anti-Catholicism. "Color outside the lines, but don't leave the page." The closer we get to the change, the more desperate those who don't want to accept that the legacy of their "ancestors" might no longer apply in the newly redefined world. That's my battle really, I know that the End of History is here.. the problem is that the New History will mean I am not longer in supremacy.

I think what took the frosting was on the way out from work, seeing a photo of our beloved President at today's Washington event for the National Day of Prayer. I have been frothing all over all day about my relations with external controls and the similarities with that as a greater American experience, and trying not to be so aggressively negating to religion and the religious. But between the new viciousness of the American evangelical, the materialistic apocalyptic flimflammery of the new megachurches, and now a president who was probably praying that I should find his God or I should hopefully drop dead.... I feel like Dresden before the firebombing... as a gay secular humanist, not enough to scorch me, but they wanna really burn me to beyond ashes. Now, I find out that even though I have been long-term celibate, and free of hard drugs, that the FDA says I can't give sperm to a sperm bank, while a straight sybaritic junkie can drop a wad for a wad all he wants....
What gets me is that all this so that they can believe they are in the right with God and nature... and far as I am concerned, if there is a God... boy, the Almighty would be so pissed. In the strange world of abstract hyperbole, let us imagine the King of Kings stomping about, or fuming on his luminescent gilded throne, and looking down upon all His children. The heavens roil and thunder as He kvetches earnestly, "Oy! Man! Would you believe this? So, here, I give them the gifts of self-awareness, so they can perceive the fullness of My creation, and then I give them free will so that they can experience the fullness of my Creation... and look at the meshugghe humans... they deny the fullness of my creation, say my creations must be flawed, and blame each other for everything not being the way they want it, usually in My name! What do I have to do with anything, already? They got everything they need without Me, since Hello! That was the point! That's it, I'm moving to Alpha Centauri to just work on a sentient species of ferns. Shmucks."
This week alone I've been called indirectly a fool by a born-again quoting Proverbs at me, and not because I deny God, I dare to deny the necessity of God. What narcissistic conceit from Man! Let's not just believe that God created all this for Man alone, but then to concern God with your petty xenophobic bickering with those among you that you are convinced aren't one of you,when you are all God's children! Believe in the infinite love of the Almighty, yet somehow it is only infinite for the ones who believe in the right words and right skin color or gender arrangement? Bah! God's good graces probably shine upon those who leave Him the fuck alone and don't screw with His creation.

Harper's Magazine for May 2005 was exceptional, and expect some links to articles when it gets indexed on the website next month. But these two entries had to be posted... let's start with from the Editor's Notebook, "Wrath of the Lamb":

"Advice administered as threat conforms to the ethic of the government currently in office in Washington, consistent not only with the character of the deity portrayed in the Old Testament but also with the modus operandi of the Coreleone and Gambino crime families. Profess loyalty, show respect, launder the money, or expect to wind up whacked or left behind. The born-again capos and underbosses of the Bush Administration (the President himself; Tom DeLay, majority leader in the House; Senators Rick Santorum [R. Pa.] and Sam Brownback [R. Kans.]; Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice) make their bones by robbing the poor to pay the rich and holding fast to the doctrine of preemptive strike, as certain as the prophet Ezekiel that on the day of the wrath when the Lord redeems mankind in a flood of purifying fire and a wonder of Hollywood explosions, the faithful and the pure in heart shall find their way home to Paradise.
The guarantee of terrible punishment for God's enemies, combined with the assurance of an ending both happy and profitable for God's business associates, provides the plot for the Left Behind series of Neo-Christian fables (thirteen volumes, 62 million copies sold) that have risen in popularity over the last ten years in concert with the spread of fundamentalist religious belief and the resurrection of the militant Christ. The co-authors of the books, Tim LaHaye and Jerry P. Jenkins, tell the story of the Raptureon that marvelous and forthcoming day when the saved shall be lifted suddenly to heaven and the damned shall writhe in pain; like most of the prophets who have preceded them to the corporate skyboxes of boundless grace, they express their love of God by rejoicing in the hatred of man. Just as the Old Testament devotes many finely wrought verses to the extermination of the Midianites (also to the butchering of all the people and fatted calves in Moab), Lahaye and Jenkins give upward of eighty pages to the wholesale slaughter of apostates in Boston and Los Angeles, the words as fondly chosen as the film footage in Mel Gibson's The Passion of the Christ or the instruments of torture in a seventeen century Catholic prison. The twelfth book in the series delight in the spectacle of divine retribution at the battle of Armageddon: "Their innards and entrails gushed to the desert floor, and those around them turned to run, they too were slain, their blood pooling and rising in the unforgiving glory of the Christ.""

Published on Sunday, May 1, 2005 by the New York Times
Godzilla vs. the Giant Scissors: Cutting the Antiwar Heart Out of a Classic
by Brent Staples

Film directors who once stood helpless while studios recut their movies can now console themselves with "directors' cuts" put out on DVD. This option was not available to the influential Japanese director Ishiro Honda, whose 1954 classic "Godzilla" - known in Japan as "Gojira" - made a household name of the towering reptile who stomped a miniature Tokyo into the ground while raking the landscape with his fiery thermonuclear breath.
A fire-breathing reptile is pretty much the same in any language. But the butchered version of the film that swept the world after release in the United States was stripped of the political subtext - and the anti-American, antinuclear messages - that had saturated the original. The uncut version of the film is due out on home video early next year, and should push serious Godzilla fans to rethink the 50-year evolution of the series. It should also show them that they were hoodwinked by the denatured Americanized version that dominated many of their childhoods in the late 20th century. At the same time, Godzilla fans are on the edge of their seats about a new film that should be released in the United States soon.
The original "Gojira" was never intended as a conventional monster-on-the-loose movie. Nor did it resemble the farcical rubber-suit wrestling matches or the domesticated movies (with Godzilla cast as a mammoth household pet) that the series degenerated into during the 1960's and 70's.
As the historian William Tsutsui reminded us in last year's cult classic, "Godzilla on My Mind," the 1954 movie was a dark, poetic production that dealt openly with Japanese misgivings about the nuclear menace, environmental degradation and the traumatic experience associated with World War II.
The nuclear annihilations of Hiroshima and Nagasaki were still fresh in mind when the famous Toho Company embarked on the "Gojira" project in 1954. But Japanese fear of nuclear catastrophe was given fresh impetus in the spring of that year, when the United States detonated a huge hydrogen bomb at Bikini Atoll in the central Pacific. Japanese fishermen aboard a trawler were exposed to nuclear fallout. Japanese consumers panicked and declined to eat fish after irradiated tuna was found to have slipped into the nation's food supply.
In the film, the H-bomb blast awakens and irradiates a dinosaur that has somehow escaped extinction. The reptile strides ashore and begins his trademark devastation of the Tokyo landscape. The nuclear antecedents were not at all lost on Honda, a World War II veteran who passed through the bombed-out city of Hiroshima and witnessed the damage firsthand. Honda later said that he envisioned the fiery breath of Godzilla as a way of "making radiation visible," and of showing the world that nuclear power could never be tamed.
He also told an interviewer: "Believe it or not, we naïvely hoped that the end of Godzilla was going to coincide with the end of nuclear testing."
That was clearly a tall order for a monster movie. But Honda's message never had a chance because most of the world never received it. The American company that bought the rights to distribute the film in this country cut a large chunk from Honda's original film and rearranged the plot. The biggest change involved splicing in Raymond Burr, who played an American reporter chronicling the devastation for the press. Dialogue that dealt heavily with human suffering, the morality of all-out war - and the temptation to play God with weapons of mass destruction - was left on the American cutting room floor.
The exclusion of the antinuclear theme in the American version is hardly surprising. Hollywood had little stomach for anti-American rhetoric during the McCarthyite 1950's. But the American production of "Godzilla" that starred Matthew Broderick a half-century later showed that Hollywood did not understand the monster, either.
The sleek, animated "American" Godzilla somehow managed to be less scary than the Japanese actor in the latex suit. Part of the problem is that the American Godzilla relied on stealth and cunning instead of the brute force displayed by the original. Some fans felt like walking out when the American Godzilla, confronted by a military threat, turned and ran. The essence of Godzilla is that he keeps stomping relentlessly forward, no matter what you throw his way.
It is fitting, then, that the American Godzilla is K.O.'ed by the real thing in the 28th and perhaps final installment, "Godzilla Final Wars," which should make it into general release in America sometime soon. It's also fitting that the original Godzilla movie, which was dismembered a half-century ago in America, is finally being shown in its full and uncut form.
Copyright 2005 The New York Times Company

I feel so 21st century, I swear. I am sitting in a world art coffeehouse working on a wireless connection off my laptop, while drinking iced coffee and reading Lyndon LaRouche. Okay, I own up that the LaRouche part is scary, but he's getting hot again with the West Coast agitated youth set. Then again, these were the backbone of the doomed Deaniac movement, useless and futile political gestures being a truly Pacific experience. Not that I feel particularly hip, since as I have said before I am so square, I've passed right into octagonal. I'd more likely call myself a sellout, but then again, I don't see myself running off to the woods, living in a shack off a diet of squirrel and beans, and writing the Talmud for the new age (which no-one would read unless I committed acts of even more futile violence.) I am least certain, unlike some I know, that I am living in the right time and right place. Going backward to claim some affinity with a romanticized historical epoch is clearly pointless, as a Jew, I'd be kicked out of whatever country I lived in, or mowed down by the conqueror of the month, and as a homosexual, I would be the centerpiece at one of the Church's gala sausage roast or other civilized moral mixers. They call these past days "simpler times," which means unsimple souls need not apply, please take a number for the next berth on the prison ship, thank you. Now we shouldn't underappreciate those who came before us, because if you think living with traffic and smog is bad, try bubonic plague and open sewers. No matter how fucked the people and the planet seem to be these days, least we live with an understanding now of the possibilities higher than a just king and a merciful afterlife. Or so I hope. Then least I have the comforting measure of knowing that I will be laughed at by those future students of history as I laugh at those who came before me for being uncultured neanderthals.

I formally inaugurate this posting as the first true wireless post to the KPC. Yes, Gentlebeings All, we have finally reached the must vaunted wireless age, where humans can properly and expeditiously place anything shameless and narcisstic onto the web with the ease of the aether. I feel so goshdarn privileged to be a part of this new massive waste of informational space with the flurry of unsubstantiated opinion and irrational precognition that shall be rivalled only by the sheer tsunami of pure delusion put forth by the 21st century media. Oh the power now at my fingertips, to join humanity in its great quest for judging by trivia and superstition instantaneously, and sharing it with the great masses who will never read or hear a word from the new prophets. Okay, now I am choked up, and words fail me now. Just stay tuned for the new transcendent heresy to come.