It is good to have Avram back, and working nicely. Here I am at the artsy coffeehouse not far from work, cappuchino at hand, and once again clueless about what to say about how I feel and what I think. I'm hoping I've kicked my engine into proper gear again, but as is the way of things now, if the engine goes at the right speed, then I'm probably driving it the wrong direction. I have to watch out for my expectations of movement, because that usually ends up being like the way they used to cheat on cars driving in the old movies. You know, how the car would stand still in a studio and rock about slightly, while the only thing moving was the background scrolling by on a screen. I've been so focused on how I physically feel and how what physically I should do to facilitate change in my life, I didn't realize how brutal I had gotten. I nearly tore my therapist (yes, I'm a good Jewish boy, so of course, I'm in therapy) apart limb from limb verbally the other day, just for suggesting I might be frustrating myself and not seeing new ways out of the racetrack I am lapping over and over at reckless and impatient speeds. (Man, I use alot of automobile metaphors for a guy who hasn't owned a car in several years. Must be the American in me showing.)

I did finish the first of Robert Anton Wilson's three-volume Cosmic Trigger series, Final Secrets of the Illuminati. Amazing amazing book. I really can't give a full judgement of it, as it is still working down through my nervous system. It is really important right now for me to read about Wilson's own journey into metaprogramming his mind and how his experiments in consciousness were so interwoven, in give and take, with the deep experiences of his life during that time. The breath of authenticity is in his writing, even if you can never be sure how much he is saying is just guerrila ontological weirdness, or pure thought-provoking bullshit. Then that's nothing that isn't mirrored in any seeker's life, really. A few times I denied any truth in the book, but that was mostly because my reality is so tight and I am so angry at anyone who seems to experience what I hold as pure theory. Oddly, denial somehow always makes me feel more alive, because it is definitely something entirely human. But, he definitely went alot more esoteric and mystical than I can imagine going, with everything from Crowleyian Magick, Raja Yoga, Extraterrestrial contact, and quantum psychology. Still, lesson learned is that there is a difference between believing in nothing definitively (as mentioned in the prologue I posted here) and a willingness to believe in the power possible in everything.

It's too much to go into (but I might post a summation later) the whole Timothy Leary idea of the eight neural circuits of the human mind. Wilson advocated ways, using his own experiences, to awaken the higher circuits and explore the lower ones, that readers could try, but I doubt I will be able to walk that path. Then this has always been about my own path, finding my own thought-action processes to keep awakening my human potential. Or least get better comedy material from it. Since Leary is mentioned, you can assume correctly that drugs are large in the workings of these consciousness experiments, heavy on the psychedelics, hold the onions. That is a road I don't really think is wise to take in my case, considering that my major "imprint" of LSD, as Leary puts it, was a bad trip of mammoth proportions, in which so much fear and violence were involved that I doubt I could de-imprint it without some major serious expert help, which I do not have. Anyway, beyond some lower-order substances, I worry too much about dabbling in something so adverse to holding down a job. (Hateful as I am about being chained to practicality. But then anything is possible. Just have to say that.) I just need to discover what kind of experiences, some classic, some original, I can try for myself. If I can get myself out of the mindfuck involved in lack of "resources" to conduct them.
I need to do something right now. I am opening the door, but it close if I fiddle with the locks too much. Even my job is a detriment. It will make for some interesting reading, since the notebook that I keep for it will be this blog.

I just hope I can gain more experience to build the language to explain what is happening to the totality of my life, because it hurts, not just because I refuse to allow for the lack of words, but because how much would I gain in my heresy, if I don't share. I'm so tired and distant to those around me, because most of the time I either can't explain, or fall back into abstraction of bullshit. That and I have to believe that I can risk the torch and the stake. That would be a good death, if death is ever truly good. Better that than the blind stagnation of a living death, never answering the call to hook myself to the currents of evolution, and take the ride of my life.

From selections of the Notebooks of Eric Hoffer (known as the longshoreman philosopher of San Francisco) are published in Harper's Magazine for July 2005.

THE DESIRE FOR PRAISE

This food-and-shelter theory concerning man's effort is without insight. Our most persistent and spectacular efforts are concerned not with the preservation of what we are but with the building up of an imaginary conception of ourselves in the opinions of others. The desire for praise is more imperative than the desire for food and shelter. 1952

LITTLE TO SAY

If writing gives us satisfaction, we are likely to end up writing for definite periods each day even when we have little to say. The hanging on to an empty form is almost as natural since it is the form only that we can control and stage. There is, of course, also the unconscious assumption that once you stage the form, the content will come to nest in of itself. All ritual is perhaps based on this assumption: you stage the gesture and words that go with fervor and faith and you assume that the latter will somehow materialize. 1952

FACT AND OPINION

We are ready to die for an opinion but not for a fact: indeed, it is our readiness to die that we try to prove the factualness of our opinion. 1955

SRI KRISHNA:

He who knows bliss in the Atman
And wants nothing else.
Cravings torment the heart:
He renounces cravings.
I call him illumined.
Not shaken by adversity,
Not hankering after happiness:
Free from fear, free from anger,
Free from the things of desire.
I call him illumined.
The bonds of flesh are broken.
He is lucky, and does not rejoice:
He is unlucky, and does not weep.
I call him illumined.

The tortoise can draw in his legs:
The seer can draw in his senses.
I call him illumined.

The abstinent run away from what they desire
But carry their desires with them:
When a man enters Reality,
He leaves his desires behind him.

Even a mind that knows the path
Can be dragged from the path:
The senses are so unruly.
But he controls the senses
And recollects the mind.
And fixes it on me.
I call him illumined.

- from the Bhagavad-Gita: The Song of God

NOUS: (noun) Etymology: Greek noos, nous mind 1: /'nüs also 'naus/ : MIND, REASON: (a) as an intelligent purposive principle of the world (b) the divine reason regarded in Neoplatonism as the first emanation of God 2: /'naus/ chiefly British : COMMON SENSE, ALERTNESS

- from Merriam-Webster online

Another small update: Due to a combo of the lending of Avram, being name of my laptop, to the I while he stayed here (and who is now fixing it over the next few days,) a strange malady causing pain in my eyes, and finally, a weekend wedding in Spokane with the Lady B, who I had to see before she left the country in the next few months, I've written bubkhes. Bear with me.

Friday at the German Tavern, as usual, although this time I am joined by the Indomitable I, whose arrival we are finally celebrating. His settlement is going a much steadier and quicker pace than mine did, and for that I will curse him until my dying breath.

I did write, Jeff, the perfected incestuous and unashamed son-lover of his god, and telepathic masturbator of Neil Young, last time I was here, after a liter or so of beer. And he did write back to answer the battery of questions I laid upon his spiritual battlefield. That and he gave me profound advice on what I should be contemplating the next time I yank my wee willie winkie. Then he told me all would be explained in his next paid insert in the Seattle Stranger. Well, the next issue came out, and all was explained. Unfortunately for Jeff, it was not the explanation he probably expects me to have. He's just another religious zealot. Sad, I kind of wanted him to be a an eccentric thinker with a less rigid spiritual worldview, but his messages to the masses only get more absolutist each month. Not that he's any less fascinating, mind you. He's just fallen to what I consider the deepest flaw of religion, conceit.

It's not so much a conscious conceit, but more a variant on the paths that the human ego takes. It's one of those classic logical fallacies. I am a thinking being, who can have an idea of God, so therefore God must have made me to be the highest expression central to creation, and time and space bend always to that destiny. The end of time is the end of mankind. This is a really small idea of the cosmos, and the higher power, that it is some understandable being/force that is only concerned with the spiritual status of our backwater blue marble. No matter how "alternative" and "new" a belief system presented, if it is hierarchical and purely linear, than I can't find merit in it. If I was less agnostic, I'd definitely be a Deist, with the idea of some distant alien theosophist creator who hasn't interfered with humanity since creation itself. Don't even get me started on the whole messiah concept. I think I will write Jeff again and ask him about this, just to see what reaction it raises. Like God, I'm less interested in what is active, but in the wisdom found in the passive, between the lines.

As going five whole days without blogging is now unthinkable, I knew I better stop into an internet cafe after dinner with a friend. Just a note: No city is truly blessed until you find a Chinese restaurant that makes a good Kung Pao. My absence is somewhat excuseable as I have lent the use of my laptop much to the Indomitable I, former roomate of J the Younger in Vegas, who has temporarily moved into our Seattle household as a waystation. All goes well for the I. I've had a lesson in humility as the Man has watched what is unthinkable money for myself be thrown at some naughty sewage pipes at the bottom of a considerable plumbers' trench in the front yard, and even if it is a materialist crisis, it shames my piddling existential crisis. I offered to pay more rent to help compensate, but the Man doesn't work like that, apparently. But the repair of the lovely wooden floor of my bedroom will probably come out of my own pocket, understandably. As a koan mentioned earlier in this blog goes, I am chopping wood, carrying water.

Speaking of Zen Koans... I just finished The Iron Flute: 100 Zen Koans by Nyogen Senzaki. Honestly, only a handful of those hundred were meaningful to me, but that makes sense, since a Koan is a enigmatic story that only works when the meaning is synchronous to the meaning you seek. That's the problem with reading things that are "profound," that you expect everything in that deep text to be profound, as if the profundity were inherent in the words, not in the immanence of the words in relation reflective to your life. Probably explains why biblethumpers are so impossible to deal with, since the Good Book is so amazingly profound for them, that they can't imagine it not being so for every human being on the face of the earth. But, I digress... so I am going to post a couple of the Koans that I read that I liked best. See if they might be profound for you two, but don't try too hard, then you might be failing to be Zen.

Koan #14: Pai-yun's Black and White

Pai-yun, a Zen master of the Sung Dynasty, wrote a peom:

Where others dwell,
I do not dwell.
Where others go,
I do not go.
This does not mean I refuse
Association with others;
I only want to make
Black and white distinct.

Koan #52: Hua-yen Return to the World of Delusion

A monk asked Hua-yen, "How does an enlightened person return to the world of delusion?" The master replied, "A broken mirror never reflects again, and the fallen flowers never go back to the old branches."

At first, I placed the way that my shift in reality was mirroring the fight of humanity as a whole to shift reality, as just a symbolic syncronicity, and any greater comparison to a vanity of the intellect, but I'm not so sure. Not that I am getting the idea that I am the coming Messiah or anything, just that I'm losing contact with my understanding of human history. I forget how conceit works. I wonder if this is how Nicholas of Cusa felt when he couldn't make sense of the Aristolean cosmology. Oh crap, I must be drunk if I used "Aristolean Cosmology."

I still can't accept the deepest heresy, that my brain cannot solve all my problems.

I will drink more beer and get back to you on that.

Sense-perception is experience. Experience is learning. Learning is only the first step to sense-perception.

We must have some influence on reality, since I somehow made my laptop connect to the German Tavern's server (a task which has failed the last three times I have been here.) I know its not my technological savvy.

Anyways......

I really have to broaden my social net, or something, like the Woman. Her live Journal must have a great plethora of readers, and many friends have attached themselves to her blog. My Blogger, which I keep a counter on, had three visits today. One was me checking on how many visitors, and the other two were The Woman.

I've always been fascinated by "fringe theology," or the study of the (sometimes very) alternative modern expressions of religious exploration, everything from the darkly cultic, to the splinters from the major religions, even, the solo players, out there trying to get their sacred visions heard. I have to face facts that in a sense, I'm just another solo player, out there, even if I am trying to get my more secular and/or metaphysical vision out there. So I guess I feel a strange affinity. Then, you have to try to picture how way out there the first practicioners of those now accepted religions must have sounded. Just the idea of ONE god. What a downer, only having one god, and one that you'll really never see, and no big ritual parties to boot? No wonder the Mesopotamians, the Romans, and the Bedouins must have said, "Screw that!" to the vision of Abraham, Jesus, and Mohammed. So in the end, you never know. In that vein, I present to you a link for a local prophet and perfected being whose rambling and polyglotic writings have graced the pages of two of the free Seattle alternative weeklies. Apparently, he managed to open an organic food business at the right time here, a number of years ago, and now can afford to buy multiple full page ads to grace us with his new vision of the coming future. Man, if you can afford it, go for it.

http://www.isaacsword.com
I doubt you will want to read the full article/advertisements, but you should. It's a rich symbolic narrative. Even if he comes across as an older gay guru who believes himself to be the son of the new God, and advocates religious services which are either incestous polysexual menages, or a room full of naked boys masturbating. Enjoy.

I started on a much promised letter to J the Elder today, and I nearly passed out for the effort. The gulf between where I am and how I can explain is widening, and will keep doing so if the framework building and the reality now manifested continue to tear away irreconcilably from each other. I can feel them interweaving in subtle ways around the periphery. Just whenever I try to make their language and syntax match, I start sweating and I get woozy. I was summarizing what I've been through in the last weeks, and I couldn't do it. I think I am better at just riding the probabilities and waiting for the voice that comes with the new sense-perception wave to catch up. My head is still too much... in my head.

But did want to share this thought... Ask a fundamentalist Christian who believe there is no salvation without Christ, and Hell awaits those who aren't saved, if the six million Jews killed during the Holocaust are all in Hell, then.

I think I will go look for a pint.

"It is impossible for the world machine to have this sensible earth, air, fire, or anything else for a fixed and immovable center. For in motion there is no simply minimum, such as a fixed center.... And although the world is not Infinite, it cannot be conceived of as finite, since it lacks boundaries within which it is enclosed. ... Therefore, just as the earth is not the center of the world, so the sphere of fixed stars is not its circumference."

"Since it always appears to every observer, whether on the earth, the sun, or another star, that one is, as if, at an immovable center of things and that all else is being moved, one will always select different poles in relation to oneself, whether one is on the sun, the earth, the moon, Mars, and so forth. Therefore, the world machine will have, one might say, its center everywhere and its circumference nowhere, for its circumference and center is God, who is everywhere and nowhere."
- Nicholas of Cusa (1401-64)

(Just a note, Nicholas was never accused of heresy for this view, but Giordano Bruno expanded on Nicholas' ideas and was burned at the stake for heresy against The Church in 1600.)

"It should be obvious to all intelligent readers (but curiously is not obvious to many) that my viewpoint in this book is one of agnosticism. The word "agnostic" appears explicitly in the Prologue and the agnostic attitude is restated again and again in the text, but many people still think I "believe" some of the metaphors and models employed here. I therefore want to make it even clearer than ever before that

I DO NOT BELIEVE IN ANYTHING

This remark was made, in these very words, by John Gribben, physics editor of the New Scientist magazine in a BBC-TV debate with Malcolm Muggeridge, and it provoked incredulity on the part of most viewers. It seemed to be a hangover of the medieval Catholic era that causes most people, even the educated, to think that everybody must "believe" in something or other, that if one is not a theist, one must be a dogmatic atheist, and if one does not think Capitalism is perfect, one must believe fervently in Socialism, and if one does not have blind faith in X, one must alternatively have blind faith in not-X or the reverse of X.
My own opinion is that belief is the death of intelligence. As soon as one believes a doctrine of any sort, or assumes certitude, one stops thinking about that aspect of existence. The more certitude one assumes, the less there is left to think about, and a person sure of everything would never have any need to think about anything and might be considered clinically dead under current medical standards, where the absence of brain activity is taken to mean that life has ended.
My attitude is identical to that of Dr. Gribbin and the majority of physicists today, and is known in physicists today, and is known in physics as "the Copenhagen Interpretation," because it was formulated by Dr. Niels Bors and his co-workers c.1926-28. The Copenhagen Interpretation is sometimes called "model agnosticism" and holds that any grid we use to organize our experience of the world is a model of the world and should not be confused with the world itself. Alfred Korzybski, the semanticist, tried to popularize this outside physics with the slogan , "The map is not the territory." Alan Watts, a talented exegete of Oriental philosophy , restated it more vividly as "The menu is not the meal.""

- from the Preface of the New Edition of Cosmic Trigger: Volume 1, Final Secrets of the Illuminati by Robert Anton Wilson

(Although this is really a fragment from yesterday written off-line, I'm posting it anyhow, for the sake of my blog narrative.)

The internet is down at the German tavern, forcing me to start this blog entry on Word, which is alright as I can’t remotely figure what to say. I’m hoping the Internet comes back on here by the time I am drunk enough to just ramble in the corridors of my mind. The last thing I need to do is bemoan the troubles at work or money matters, as that diverts from the abstractions, since those are what is real. But I also don’t need to go into some philosophical interpretation of some greater thing than my work, because that also diverts from where I need to be. It’s so hard to be where I want to be, since that location is internal, and if I define it; I try to force that place to manifest. Not like I could really see it right now. I’m realizing that I am doing many things necessary to live freely, but I’ve done it by somehow circumventing my intellect to do so, at the cost of direct perception, therefore the emotional impact, of said acts. What I do is not what I say, or more over, what I think. Picking daffodils around a sleeping man-eating tiger.

I doubt I will be derailed on this latest leg of this metaphysical marathon, since I still managed to rewire some more neuron net even while dealing with a building fire drill, and all the management and engineer type, including some property poombahs. Spend most of my shift just trying to stay grounded, and not spin my wheels until I snap an axle... again.
All over there only being one cat, or one cat consciousness. I kind of feel bad about that, since it was yet another anti-discursive mispocheh with the Native Pagan (who we will call NP from here on, even though referring to NP in my blog will probably get me into even hotter water,) which I can own I started by my defensive response. Funny thing, is he gets so mad at me for not listening to his ideas, when in the end, my resistance to his ideas tend to birth better clarity of my ideas. I doubt I would even be in this growth space if I didn't constantly bicker with him. Even more ironic, much of this is over the fact he believes so wholeheartedly in the power of conflict against the Man and the mindless masses. And then the one cat consciousness came from how he took offense at "What the [Bleep] Do We Know?" this movie on the metaphysical impact of changing definitions of thought brought on by quantum physics. NP said something along the lines that even a six-month old cat knows that is real. And I said that not only don't cats have human consciousness, but all cats are one cat. And he has no idea how helpful he's been for all that.
Has nothing really to do with a single cat consciousness, but with whether a dog has a Buddha-Nature. There runs a famous Zen koan: A students asks his Master, "Do dogs have a Buddha-Nature?" The Master replies, "Mu! (No!)" What the koan taught me was that not that dogs have no consciousness, but the truth is Buddha-nature is the answering of No to "Is what is abstract, real?" The Zen Masters I've read recommend that you use "Mu!" as a mantric exercise to deny reality the power of the real, and open yourself to the immediate presence of the real that is taken for the abstract. Nothing really exists outside ourselves that we can really know, because we only accept one abstraction as what is real, when all the abstractions of quantum possibility are just as real at that time. Nothing is. Nothing is not.
Just getting really fucking wild how much alot of things that I learned in my life, are making so much more sense. Honestly, I've done a good job of shutting out my past, as if I could obliterate it by disowning it. Well the past doesn't exist, true.... but that doesn't mean it isn't real, if the experience of it still resides in the pathways of my mind. But again, maybe all my time resides there, since I don't touch time. I touch the experience of time.
In my first year at San Francisco State University, I took the first of several meaningful classes in the NEXA program, which focused the impact between developments in science, with the greater human experience, in the arts, literature, and culture. It was the equivalent of my junior-level English Composition class, and the main theme was the interaction of modern man with the environment. We read this awesome non-fictional chronicle, "Into the Wild" by Jon Krakauer, which told the story of a tragic journey of a young suburban adult lost in modern society whose journey through America ended up with his death, alone, by starvation, in the backwoods of Alaska. For the essay, the class was asked a simple question, "Was his journey worth it?" Unsurprisingly, the vast majority of the class answered that it hadn't been, he was some confused affluent kid who didn't know what he was doing, and ended up dying because he was ill-prepared. Always the contrarian, I had to find a way to make the answer, yes, and prove it. Outside of college studies, I was discovering the wonderful world of Joseph Campbell, and was reading his most read comparative mythology study, "Hero of a Thousand Faces", which explored the meaning and the shared myth of the hero's journey as a globally shared allegory for journey of human discovery. So, I said that the guy was better off that he had answered the call of his soul and mind to pursue something beyond his small childhood world, and made the journey even if he didn't "finish" it and return to share it with others. And it got me an A on the paper, and a comment from the professor that she had never read anything like it before. I had never gotten an A on one of my essays before. It felt all proud. But now I know I didn't understand what I had written. I had said that the experience of the journey, is the journey.
That spun off even further back into the nebulous mists of my past, to the height of the worst years of my life, when I started public high school, when my religion, my culture, and my family couldn't connect to me, and I hurt so deep for it. My hyperactive meds at the time were so strong that they murdered my appetite, and my bottomed-out sociak status meant the library was the least dangerous place to spend my lunch, since I didn't eat. I didn't eat lunch for three years, solid, in fact. And I really thought I could find the answers in all those books to explain why "the universe hated me." Alot of what I found in those books, I retaught myself later, believing that I was so set on my quest to escape my pain by going even deeper into my head, that I misinterpreted to make it fit what I wanted. But now... I'm not so sure that I can say that. Just I buried some seeds so deep that they've only come to fruition this many years later. I never let myself value that is where my love of abstraction began, with the Greeks.
I went all Western back then, looking to the "great founders" of Western civilization. Socrates and Plato. Socrates would later lead to my belief in the power of always asking questions. But Plato, well, little did I know, he'd make a relativist of me. I really liked the concept of the Platonic forms. That every thing that exists is formed from a perfect astral model, and I could really never know that perfection. I've always thought Plato adviced that even though perfection could never be known, that shouldn't stop the pursuit of it. But back then, I was more into abusing the Allegory of the Cave, where the other chained guys beat up the unchained guy for telling them there was more than the shadows of the objects seen on the back cave wall. It was a neat package to justify why I was better than everyone else, I could see the objects, and they hated me for it. I still let that headtrip screw with me, and I understand that I never saw the objects. I was too busy looking for the objects to see them. The journey was lost on me, believing I'd find the real without appreciating the abstract.
Like I said, it was a big idea day. But know what? I think I enjoyed working on the ideas.