Predators of the Human Mind, The Warning

If you owned a magic lamp, the kind that contained a genie who would grant any wish you made, what would you do with it? Really think about it.  The question is not "What would you wish for?" but "What would you do with the lamp?"  This lamp could make you the most powerful human being on the Earth; it could bring the perfect relationship; it could grant long life, indefinitely, a high quality life of meaning; it could bring the tools and conditions necessary for anything you desired: boats, planes, pilots, crews, skilled helpers, fortresses, associates--anything.  What would you do with such an object, one of a kind, and of measureless value to you or anyone else who could get their hands on it!?

I would probably create a protective structure around it.  I would use the genie to help me devise an impregnable system, foolproof, one that included safeguards for me, the owner.  I would screen my associates for their integrity.  I would screen myself to be sure I was not inflating, becoming paranoid, overly trusting, or any other trap that might endanger the lamp directly or indirectly. 

Then I would try to understand what I had; how it could best be used. Maybe the wealth of the lamp could equalize the differences between myself and others, therefore making the dangers of greed or envy less acute.  I would set the task of finding wise counsel either through my own gut sense of who to trust, or through some wisdom the genie might provide; (Genies are famously untrustworthy in fables. Always trying to get out of their servitude, but bound to it none-the-less.)

Then I would pray that it all worked out; that the possibilities would not drive me crazy; that the lamp would stay in my domain, that I would use it well, that the genie would not trick me into destroying myself, that the genie would not create unholy alliances during his missions to get things done.  I would get the genie's help in securing protection and guidance that was a level up from us, one that actually had the ability to protect. 



These steps correspond to the lines of the Gayatri mantra.  I did not look at the mantra to guide my protection plan, it seems that the mantra is a plan devised by ancients, Vishwamitra if we can believe the story, to protect a resource that they realized was of infinite, immeasurable, and practical value.

 ...the average cost of a prime-time spot is just shy of $110,000 a pop.According to analysis by New York independent media agency TargetCast tcm, the average price of a 30-second spot in the first quarter of 2011 was $108,956, up 5 percent from the year-ago period.  Anthony Crupi. Ad Week

  ...but the average cost of a 30-second spot in "Sunday Night Football" in the 2012-2013 TV season is a budget-busting $545,142, up from $512,367 last season... Brian Steinberg.  Ad Age/ Media News

Notice that these prices, a million dollars a minute, do not seem important; they do not seem to create a sense of alarm or caution.  Ad prices tell you that someone is willing to pay a million dollars a minute to get in your head because they feel confident, based on research and experience, that they can make you do things you would not do on your own creative volition.  This is mind control,  hypnosis,  brain washing; call it what you want, but manipulative coercion by any other name is still manipulative coercion. Notice that you might feel some fear, imagining yourself tied to a chair for hours, or even minutes, with a Chinese mind-control agent performing "Tham-zing" to induce you to "See things the right way." Yet, you feel certain that the soothing voices, gentle or jarring wash of images, combined with your own relaxed body is not effective, and instills no concern.  Why don't you notice that they are the same thing? Could that be part of the message...that you are invulnerable to coercion through media?

Predators are real.  Believe it. Explore it, don't take my word for it.  It is easy to notice; watch the Disney channel for an hour, the news, even National Public Radio. Notice your reactions to events in life, a smiley ball flashing on a computer that says, "Good job!"  or, "Sorry, about that." Feel the calm that might come when a soothing synthesized voice says what floor the elevator is on; or the sense of relaxation and surrender when white or blue coats are all around, speaking medicalese, offering firm suggestions with complete confidence for what you can do with your own body. Notice that they have no accountability at all, and you will pay the full price for those suggestions.  Notice where your sense of comfort comes from; is it based on research? Or is the conviction based on conditioning, Marcus Welby ,MD, or Criminal Minds? Notice most of all that your reaction to events or information seems like it is all yours, that you produced it through some flawless integral process.  But do you know what that process is? Predators are real, and they know what that process is far better than you do. They are professionals, they go to school to learn it, they work to practically understand it every day; they have Phd's, research grants.  They have a genie in a bottle to figure out how to get at yours.  Enough.  You should no more trust your mind to media of any kind, talking heads, experts, etc...than you would send your 9 year old daughter to a Los Angeles liquor store at 2 am. 

This blog is media.  The writing and photos are meant to influence you. The questions to ask are: Who is presenting the message?  Why are they presenting it?  What is in it for them? How does the message affect me? (Does it create fear, anger, desire; or does it cause me to seek information, question my world, connect with others in beneficial ways?)

It helps to examine the difference between "Big Mind" small mind, the brain, patterns, anti-patterns, and memes.  Later.

The Gayatri Mantra: Protection for the Thinking Mind

1.Om 2.Bhur 3.Bhuvah 4.Svaha

5.Tat Savitur 6.Varenyum

7.Bhargo Devasya 8.Dimahi

9.Dhiyo Yonah 10.Prachodayat

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=P26ZvKY--KY

1.Om contains all that follows, like an umbrella or womb

This Mantra is effective on three planes: 2.the ground, 3.the world, and 4.the ideal

or, 2.substance, 3.effect, and 4.cause.

5. That effulgence that appears in my world as the radiance of the sun 6. is worthy of worship, beyond me and so is superior to me. (Inner realization of humility is the ground of the protection and illumination offered by this mantra, I generate humble receptivity by noticing that the inner light of the sun, a flame, an inspired moment, a mind and all the other bright things share a common thread.  They are not different, may I be like them, humble, radiant, serving without reward, simply by existing in their true nature of illumination.) 

7. The radiance that I notice has a divine origin; that means it is beyond any human intelligence.  Effect cannot comprehend cause and so the appropriate relationship is to notice, pay attention.  8.This is meditation. ( A thirsty person does not emulate water, they drink it until their thirst is quenched. Posturing is not friendship. Humility is the ground of both, recognize the vulnerability of the body for fluid, recognize the desire of the person for companionship.Meditation on divine radiance "tat savitur", "bhargo devasya" is to say, 'I am a light being, the light is replenished by the light.  The glow of intelligence is fed by the 'light behind all lights' and it comes into me when I drink it through meditation...which is simply noticing it until I am through). This is the realm of action, the world, honest participation in 'effects'. There is only truth, so the only choice available to a person is to participate in it or avoid it.  Noticing the light is full participation in the light and the effects of Light on light are spontaneous.

9. Noticing the source of light (tat savitur) is the action of light in my own mind and it leaves a residual effect or object because the mind becomes what it worships; what it notices. "Dhiyo yo nah" is 'that which acted on my mind...please don't take my word for it, I am still trying to comprehend this tiny phrase in the mantra).

10. I offer this 'object' as a prayer to the intelligence that enlivens, energizes, actualizes this mantra so that I may be illumined.) 

This Mantra of illumination and protection is like a house, vehicle, or Mer-ka-ba. 

It has a floor "tat savitur varenyum", humility, which is symbolized by the posture of lying down, resting, receiving, becoming low.

The walls, inquiry, shape daily patterns.
On the ground of acceptance one can act.  Walking is the posture associated with action, "doing" by directing attention toward the core of attention itself. 

The roof or ceiling of the house is symbolized by the sitting posture; sitting is an "honest" posture because the body is expressed as "standing on its' tail".  The arms and legs are allowed to be passive while action is contained in balance, the beginning of neural reality plugged into earth, the head in polar contrast, capping the spine. Prayer, or the humble recognition of the need for animation through the agency of "the fire within" is the ceiling on realizing the gifts of the mantra. 

The great mantras, like the gayatri, the mahamryunjaya mantra, om namah shivaya, om mani padme hum, and others, are mandalas, Geometries, mazes, that can bind up time with idle repetition, or free the mind through awareness.    

What is a Mantra?

What is a Mantra?

The question is meaningless until you ask, "What is the brain", not "a blob of noodle-like cholesterol", or "a thinking machine; that is unless you then ask, "What is thinking?"

This blob is not necessary to connect to reality.  Its purpose is to limit reality into bites.

 

Mantra is spontaneous and reflects what we worship, or attend to,
the mantra above aims to expand the local self.  Since that is a contradiction
it is not true...the local self cannot create anything, so what creates?

 A mantra is a response to the brain; as a lawnmower is an artifact of some cultural attitude toward grass and lawns, so a mantra is a technology devised to manage aspects of the mind.  If the mantra is examined, the brain can be understood.  What is a nervous system? or "Why" is a nervous system.  Think about it. Why, in the scheme of inert gases supposedly clumping and forming elements and a gazillion reactions later, amino acids, etc...why would elements "think", or as John Dobson puts it "chew gum and walk around."  A nervous system is what Deepak Chopra calls a "transducer"; it takes an electro magnetic field, and translates it into abstract meanings. Something like thought must create or maintain a pattern that turns into a vehicle for the thought.  There is no precedent of grosser levels of organization developing randomly into subtler levels of organization.  It is as though the unlimited mind finds itself in a deep well, the stones and dimensions being self-created and relies on news from the mouth of the well, a small opening so far above, for contact with the outside world.

 

A fractal pattern of meaning and control shows itself.  They seem co-dependent: the meaning of something is found in its achievement of freedom from the control of something; and the controller cannot be a master unless the controlled participates by pretending to be controlled. Take birth as an example.  A zygote begins really as a controller, its presence in the womb animates a support system that determines all kind of chemical and hormonal realities in the body.  One aspect of that is the limit to the process itself, so the embryo has to "escape" from a convulsing womb. Symbolically, and as described by Stanislov Grof in his Holonomic theories, the newborn looks back at its "conquest" of the uterus, the consuming environment.   

 

The brain, the interpreter, is also the rigid gusset to rein in the non local nervous system.  In other words, we reach into each other and everything limitlessly, like water flowing in water, or the mycelium fungal networks infusing the soil, such that the soil seems alive, or the fungus seems like soil. "It is all one thing" and I am privy to that, simply because my nervous system dips into the life stream and reports on the whole thing all at once. The brain is a corset, a restrictor of consciousness. Mantra undoes the brain, loosens the girdle, and allows contact with reality.  Paradoxically it does it through discipline.  Now there are 2 disciplines:  the corset of the brain that reduces thought into an electromagnetic stream, and the discipline of loosening that corset. 2 "modalities", 2 very different goals.

There is a mantra in the Ashtanga yoga tradition of Pattabais Jois spoken to the guru Patanjali, the author of the Yoga Sutras and the delineator of Yoga. (So he is probably not one person, and his name interpreted as "fallen prayer", it also could mean "serpent prayer" makes him sound more like an antidote than a personality.

 "vande gurunam charanarvinde sandarsita svwatma sukhavabodhe, Nihshreyase jangalikayamane, samsara haalahala moha shantyai //Abahu purushakaram, shankachakrasi dharinam sahasra shirasam svetam pranamami Patanjalim."

Vishnu rests on sesha, the serpent, as the brain rests on the neural network.
The local self can only reign supreme when it recognizes it can do nothing
without Big Mind tapped by the neural net, the brain does nothing but
label the experience.

Roughly it means," I bow to the gurus feet which lead to the sublime self through their presence. They lead out of delusion, as by the treatment of the skilled jungle physician (the one who knows the whole thing, the good the bad...). From the shoulders down, he has the form of Visnu, a human form wielding weapons of mace, discus.  He has a thousand radiant serpent heads above the shoulders, I bow to this form." The 1000 radiant heads are our own neural net, reaching outward without limit. The form of a human body is the vehicle that unrestricted consciousness grows out of. The 4 armed form of Visnu is "the rub"; it is the mediator between the so called local body and the non-local consciousness.  It can act as a restricting lawgiver, a punisher, a giver of boons, and it can sleep.  In any of these cases, it is there as part of the picture and has to be appreciated, understood, and dealt with. Mantra is the language of this 4 armed form that gives or takes freedom. The brain always does mantra which is a form of worship or obeisance; ruminating, repetition, fixating, is the natural state of the brain.  It becomes what is worshipped.  Krishna says in the Bhagavad Gita, "Who worships the gods goes to the gods, who worships me comes to me." The "undisciplined brain" seems to lack focus, but it is intently focused on its own whimsy, driven by an interplay of drives, memories, fantasies, and biology.  It is like focusing on the objects that a juggler tosses in the air, shifting from one to another, seemingly chaotic, but in fact a definite choice: to watch the objects. The "disciplined brain" does the same thing, but pays attention to the juggler and not the objects. One is no more difficult than another, and both the disciplined and undisciplined witness see everything, the ground, the objects, the juggler and their own attention.

The point is made in various places, focus to the exclusion of all else, hold the focus, and merge into the object, eliminate peripheral objects, and hold exclusively to intention.  The difficulty is there, in making intention important enough to focus on.  It requires some self-respect, dignity, to value "mu own intention" as "worthy of worship".  From childhood we are asked, begged, threatened and bribed to forego our own intent in favor of an external agency. 

Mantra is natural and continuous; self-respect is innate, the foundation for growth and claiming space.  The problem is the mediator; what god is attended to, what form is worshipped?  Mantra will spontaneously express the relationship. 

Who Feeds You?

 

 

My wife has been feeding a black and white cat that hangs around our backyard. Now she is vamoosed to Florida indefinitely so daughter has taken over the task.  I'm sure raccoons and a skunk family under the deck appreciate the gesture.  I would.  The issue of food never goes away; there is a stream of edibles that go in one side and come out the other, until death.  In some ways every living thing is an eating machine; and then there are the habits and expectations that go with it.  Now the cat has a dependable source of food here; he may be a real entrepreneur and have little venues like this all over the neighborhood.  I can imagine him creating a side business with the excess, "Twice as nice found food boutique" or something like that.  In any case, a culture is built up around a habit that my wife started, passed on to her daughter, and will be terminated by me.  I have no intention of feeding the cat.  Call me a Social Darwinian; cats are already an exotic species, the expectation for a hand out is endless, it does not engender real love, and the problem multiplies with the cat's success at getting me to support his habits.  Who owns him anyway?

 

I hear the Rockefellers, Carnegies, Rothschild's, and Fords all over the place in my attitude.  "Get a job!  Be useful for something!" "No jobs sir, and all I wanna do is eat a few pieces of GMO cornmeal mixed with chicken scrapings off the floor of the Purina Plant." "Then you are OUT OF LUCK, the 'family camps' may have a place for you. BYE." We invent the neediness and then condemn it to hell.  What are all us cats to do in such a system?                                                     

Nothing will be solved here, rest assured.  Go to Stephan Covey, Wayne Dyer, Sri Sri Ravishankar, The Ford Foundation help line, or the Salvation Army soup line, but cats can just sit on the fence howling until it seems like they better get on with it elsewhere; until  ducking shoes in the moonlight becomes more difficult than looking cute enough to rate a free meal. You might say, "Wait a minute!  I WORK for a living!" This is where the cat is much smarter than I am, so the metaphor dies with that very point.  Cats just live.  "They don't do shit" for a living.  'Patches' or whatever his name is called, will eat and owe me nothing; not a good days work or productivity or cuteness or even a nod of approval.  I on the other hand make sure to balance my value as a creature sucking resources out of the planet against my real or imagined contributions to "THE MAN", who, by-the-way I have entrusted my planet to for safe keeping.  Let's forget about "man the higher animal" unless slavery in so many beautiful colors can be considered superior to walking as a sovereign on your own Earth.  Cats don't care about or notice boundaries, even DOGS have to be beaten (or 'conditioned'...which is mind-beating) to notice the boxes, edges, do's and don'ts that humans relish.  The higher animal is apparently a happy slave; as a hammer views all the world a nail, so the slave views all the world a sweat shop owned by fat guys with cigars. (Maybe the fat guys view the slaves as nails.)

 

 

 

Like a moth round the little yellow light at Camp Lostenforsaken's outhouse, I circle the issue of slavery while a full moon beckons just above the tree line.  Let's look up, moths, cats, slaves, and notice the full moon that has floated, huge and lamp-like above the trees. The cat is already there; I can join him.  The system works because day by day I recreate it.  The cat does not shudder in fear of hunger or rejection.  He will look at the empty bowl for a few days, then with less and less frequency, eventually going for baby birds, maybe even road kill or open garbage cans.  He won't see the memes at work, that he has fallen, and is now just a "garbage cat", a loser.  He won't look up from some mysterious meat and gristle and say, "Hey, I'm better than this!  I gotta do something!" and then head round the country trying to look cute enough for hand outs, learning tricks, rolling his eyes, or even getting depressed and losing weight, ashamed to show his loser face to other cats.  I want to learn that: The sovereignty is there, the dignity of being alive is inherent in breathing; the rest is a rat maze, dog training school, operant conditioning prison to convince me I can be improved by pulling fat guy's chariot around. 

 

Maybe I should be sure to follow the cat around and see where he goes when he leaves my empty bowl.  Maybe I should feed him because he's so great and I might learn something.  One way or another, I've got to get something to eat.  

What to Do When the Empire Looks at You



this is not me, but could be

I lead kirtan every week with a small group in town. It is call and response singing, which is a great opportunity to stretch that kind of creative muscle without skill, practice or judgment distorting the simple act of using the voice without engaging the discursive brain, like a howling wolf or a chirping bird. A lot of the songs are directed toward Krishna, the Hindu deity that plays a flute, tends cows, makes love and sport with the milk maids, steals butter, and issued the Bhagavad Gita, a fabulous summary of the spiritual path as we recognize it.  I offer a meaning behind these strange deities, strange to the Christian tradition anyway, in order to make the process of singing kirtan more "practical" and less "exotic", ('Look at me, I'm going native for a couple of hours'.).

Krishna has grown on me lately, especially since watching 'Mahabharatha War' by Peter Brooks.  The 3.5 hour movie dovetailed with divorce, foreclosure, and the economic debacle nicely and left me with a sense of having been jolted awake.  I'll discuss that at length elsewhere, but the short of it is that Krishna seems to have functioned as a purveyor of dirty tricks to help the good guys, the ones who would carry the noble aspect of Indian/Vedic culture forward for subsequent generations.  The so-called bad guys were acting in a way that would preserve no decent model for future generations.  It was more important for Krishna to preserve this "light" by hook or crook, even at the risk of the total annihilation of everyone. It was clear from the film that there are some situations where operating by the rules, clear and above board, is not appropriate. 

Krishna and Radha, she is usually in a wad because
she does not know who he is running around with.

 I mentioned on the occasion of this Kirtan that sometimes institutions which are built for the common good, become destructive.  This is obvious to anyone who cracks a history book or notices the latest war mongering rant and justifications from the usual sources at the end caps of grocery check outs, TV news or the internet. But it is today, and the land of the free home of the brave had seemed totally immune until JFK was publicly executed, and maybe on the mend until '2001 A Fear Odyssey' began. I apologize for my naiveté but I really thought, 'Truth will out'; there's still time, maybe it will.   My view has grown dark while, ironically and pleasantly, I feel better and better about the human race.  Left to our own cravings, no cage rattling, drugs, mind control, and social manipulation, humans leave each other alone and like to do the little things they do.  It takes serious leisure time, infinite cash, and generations of inbreeding to fabricate human monstrosities that can dream up genocide, bio-engineering, slave classes, and total world domination....I don't have the resources to buy the Earth and I don't know anyone who does.

Anyway, the point of the story! A few days later lady cornered me to discuss her meeting with a psychic who said the dollar would be devalued to worthlessness, the whooping cough vaccine was a death plot, and no body would get out alive, the situation ripens as we speak and the window of opportunity would shut around October, 2013.  I've been sorting through ideas along those lines for a few years and so had less reaction to the news than she did.  It is very weird to notice that the processes of the advanced nations, particularly those of the red white and blue variety are a death machine. I think red and black people have known it for a while, at least four or five hundred years. She was urgent and felt the need to act, basically to get out while she could. I tend to fish for opinions at this point, like the time my wife and I felt a hotel in New Delhi rock back and forth in an earthquake.  We discussed whether to take the suitcases down or just go, under a swaying pendant light on the 16th floor.  The melodrama combined with our ignorance and the logistical issue of taking the stair seemed more comic than dangerous, so we debated until it stopped and just stayed in the room.

A guy (now dead) named Rick Clay did a couple of long interviews on Red Ice Radio which helped me develop a pragmatic attitude toward the surreal and nightmarish world that seems to be cooking below the great screen resolution, botox injections, and developments with Smiley Myrus.

http://www.redicecreations.com/article.php?id=4789 

The most fabulous resource humans have is an awareness of consciousness.  This is the gold that every advertisement and political ploy seeks to dominate, because once the battle for the mind is won, every resource is open for the taking.  AND the mind is the primary tool that makes any resource valuable or valued in the first place.  Check out the John Taylor Gatto interviews by 9-11 whistleblower Richard Grove.

https://www.tragedyandhope.com/th-films/the-ultimate-history-lesson/ 

These discussions help make sense out of the seemingly endless series of stupid decisions that continue to create something like Orwell's 1984.  It is a battle for the mind, and there is no effective way to legislate or force that protection.  The precious gray matter is open for plunder.  It is painless and pleasant for most as the best part of being a human is pillaged by unseen forces.  It sounds pretty paranoid until one gets familiar with the history behind the dire revelations.









Man of the Century, according to Henry Luce and company

aka Time Magazine in 1938

It took confidence to admit their fetish for the fuehrer. 

It might have been more inconvenient a few years later.

It has been reported that Luce, during the 1960s tried LSD and

reported that he had talked to God under its influence.^[7]

Once ambitious to become Secretary of State in a Republican

administration, Luce penned a famous article in Life magazine in

1941, called "The American Century", which defined the role of

American foreign policy for the remainder of the 20th century

(and perhaps beyond).^[5]

 



My advice to me and anyone who will listen is to protect the mind, treat it like a million dollar PC: don't throw it around, keep it in a nice cover, don't fish around on junk websites to contract potent viruses designed by expert virus inventors, and finally, as recommended by Patanjali in his yoga sutras around 500BCE, there are three sources of good information:

1. Your own clear insight, natural to an un-perturbed mind (rare these days).
2. The writings of truly wise guides. 
3. The words of individuals who have a clear and unsullied mind, established by legitimate references, not their own assurance. (Maybe not politicians, seminar hosts, comedians, religious authorities, or anyone who ever rated a Time magazine cover. Just sayin'...)



I wonder why they chose the machine of the year to stand in for a person.
Protect your head; they won't.

   



  

Gender is Vertical, Not Horizontal

Women cannot understand men.  It is impossible for them to "walk a mile in their moccasins".  Think about it. Reality is fractal, meaning: patterns are evident throughout a system like the major branching of a tree can be seen in the minor branching of that species, and is evident in the vein pattern on the leaves.  An ovum never sees the light of day, so to speak; it stays up in there until it is either flushed out during menses or meets a sperm and morphs into a zygote.  An ovum never leaves home.  A sperm on the other hand is on a journey of transformations, starting in the scrotum somewhere it goes and hangs around a "nurse cell" until it grows a tail, not unlike a seminar on tail growing or a cellular ashram. It migrates to wait for the great moment of ejaculation to be sent on its way;  probably  to die in some futile gesture, shot into a sink or sock, obliviated for no reason at all,  just like war or the commute and a 40 hour work week. 

In fact, the average male will produce roughly 525 billion sperm cells over a lifetime and shed at least one billion of them per month. Ahealthy adult male can release between 40 million and 1.2 billionsperm cells in a single ejaculation.
In contrast, women are born with an average 2 million egg follicles, the reproductive structures that give rise to eggs. By puberty, a majority of those follicles close up and only about 450 will ever release mature eggs for fertilization.

This is the cellular model for maleness and femaleness.  The "male" in a person moves, changes, is tends toward transcendence.  The "female" tends to stay, select, limit itself because the overall script is more meaningful. Another way to look at it is, as Chris Rock says,"Fellas, it's all about HER!" And what men bring to it is not "just them", not just one guy.  Look at the picture above, she is definitely the heavy if it is a cell-to-cell confrontation.  He is a window into the larger world, maybe a bringer of the larger world.  beyond that gross generalization, it gets into genetics...the "what" are they bringing to the table, and the "how" due to gender. It is the difference between the tough rooting of a dandelion plant and the thin stalk that bolts out of it, culminating in the ubiquitous puffball that ends up in the grill of a car, an eyeball, a parking lot, or finds purpose in the crack of a sidewalk.

                 

The female is tough; the male is ephemeral, contrary to popular opinion.  In The Magical Child, by Joseph Chilton Pierce, he cites the results of those monkey tests, the ones where they take away a baby monkey's mother and replace it with various things to see what he or she will do (wire mothers, wire with carpet, wire with carpet and a clock inside, wire without carpet but with a clock etc...My own mother may have been wire and carpet with a continuous loop playing "Goodnight Sweet Jesus".)  Well, the short of it is, everybody goes crazy. But the women recover their normalcy after a couple of weeks, losing the ability to tend their young or make a nest.  The males stay balled up in a fetal position and remain psychotic forever, or until the lab assistant puts them down, whichever comes first.  (Are there any good homes who welcome psychotic monkeys?).

Yogi Bhajan, the Sikh founder of 3HO (a yoga group) said that women cannot love men, they become love.  Men must love women in order for women to become love.  These are just ideas, but they make sense to me, and I see some evidence for it.  My wife took me to a therapist a few years ago because I was not listening.  She wanted to move to Florida, and I did not; therefore I must not have been listening.  Her logic was that she had great reasons for escaping God forsaken Bend Oregon with its golf courses, ski resorts and attendant shallowness in order to move to Ft. Lauderdale with its 110 foot yachts, call girls, bars and heat with its attendant shallowness...but a genuine shallowness.  I would have heard the wisdom if my ears had been open, so we got 2 or 3 other professional opinions for 150 dollars plus, per hour.

It turns out I understood her viewpoint completely, but did not like it; case closed.  She moved. I did not. Science is not complete until pounded in the crucible of personal melodrama.

Summary.  Men: do not expect to receive the love of a woman.  If you are getting something that seems like love, it is because she is weaving something like a nest or zygote.  If she is a monkey with a wire mother, then don't expect much of a nest or weaving thing.  Instead, realize that loving a woman is your own gesture of male "becoming", that it is only love if you do it with 0 thought of rewards in the form of good sex, zygotes, nests, or biscuits. Do it because that's is what we men are, we are LOVERS, dammit (an Alan Alda imitation).  We love whatever presents itself, food, sports, neurotic women (a personal fav) and our own profile; a damn handsome profile.  We can understand women if we make an effort, they can't understand us no matter how they try, intentions count for something but don't bridge the brain gap.  It is logical; by nature maleness is an overview, therefore able to understand the inter-relationship of dissimilar things; femaleness is the up close an personal view, she knows how a situation works, with no clue as to what she is really dealing with.  Also one can remember that every man or woman has some portion of the opposite gender in there, so it is not as absolute as I have painted it thus far. 

My daughter just told me that men actually seem clueless and women understand men very well. Maybe she is right.  Maybe men are like pumped up Camaros and women are more like the Detroit assembly line; men are cranked out as special edition muscle cars with a more streamlined chassis,  less room in the cab to create more space for an engine, and a hairy paint job.  Women are NOT the standard model with plush upholstery, and more room inside, less power under the hood...they would be the factory itself from which men emerge, engines roaring, pistons thumping, jerking like nitro burning funny cars waiting for the green light, or monster trucks at the tractor pull; slugging through mud and wasting their mangled bodies on tight turns, bursting into flames, no one trotting out of the wreckage; something to talk about.

Maybe that is what we all want to happen to men so they will always be gladiators in the Circus Maximus instead of change agents to challenge the scrawny tyrants and their fleshy thumbs that determine who comes and who goes.  I'm sticking to the overview theory of masculinity until I get more evidence.

  

      

The Basis of the Dream , the Nightmare, and the Potluck Dinner, is GOOD

Basic Gratitude

I was at a pot luck birthday the other night.  The guests started to express their gratitude for different things which easily turns into a kind of sentimental, tongue in cheek exercise in "positive-r than thou" performance art so I declined and stood on the deck with my son who at that moment was not grateful for anything other than that the evening would end soon.  It did end; but on the way out the door a lady interrogated me on why I did not contribute anything. 

My view of this blight called "The Christian Era" has become dark, so typically, optimistic bromides stick in the throat, or flower as cynical barbs "raining on the parade" of people that really just don't want to be continuously reminded of the oppressive machine that harvests the usefully controlled elements and burns the rest like chaff. So I told her "I am grateful that basic reality is essentially good".  She asked me to elaborate, and this is it.

I am grateful that basic reality is essentially good.

My body is spontaneous.

It takes in food, digests, extracts the needed, rejects or stores the rest.  The alchemy of "hamburgers into hair and fingernails" requires no attention or effort by me.

The planet body complements my body automatically.

It does this by accepting all the rejected stuff into its own body, to become our ground for living, and the soil we grow in.

Honesty and goodness are inherent in our experience.

"Beauty-in, beauty out; garbage-in, garbage out": it makes sense, creates sanity, and is always the clear road to health and well-being. Things die and decay, cleaning the slate for a continuous renewal of life. We do nothing at all to enable this, it just is.

Gravity holds us so we can sit, stand, walk, or lie down.

The Earth itself stimulates, grounds, and centers us through reflexes on the soles of our feet. We are healed and enlivened by walking barefoot on the naked Earth;  it is electromagnetic.  This is given; we cannot undo the relationship through misuse, disuse or ignorance. Gravity is, and we don't know how it is possible.

Electricity works.

Invisible electrons serve every aspect of "it all". They energize bodies, machines; they hold stuff together and push stuff apart; they never tire.  They are something like grace that works in the largest and the smallest with perfect intelligence and we do not understand how any of this is happening. Even our thoughts about them are made of them.

All organisms, objects, and processes seek harmony.

Within themselves, with each other, and with their ground, all natural processes seek peace in rest or peace in motion.  It drives the entire story whether we know it, or like it, or not.

Form just "is".

Things keep their shape, and then lose it; just so.

Radiance infuses everything.

Intelligence, molecular bonds, light bulbs, and stars glow in common. We can only notice.

This is basic reality and it is good in its essence.

Tragedies, suffering, ignorance, and pain of all kinds are not human; a nest is not a bird.

They come from ideas; they are someone's fantasies of power, born of the union of creative potential and the compliant stuff of reality. They eventually come to rest in the mind, for good, or ill. Misery is not permanent and requires constant attention to persist.

Essential goodness has provided built in limits for endurable pain and suffering. 

Our reality is totally composed of stuff that is utterly good and our felt experience always has the potential to reflect that. 

God, miracles, and atheism

There is a trend toward atheism that I don't understand.  
The term "atheist" seems so ambiguous that it does not mean anything; mainly because "God" is so ambiguous that its' meanings are lost in the personal background of the person who uses the word.  I cannot believe that atheists are simply people who deny the "Old Man With A Beard", or embrace a random sequence of events that led to Darwin and his treatise on species that 'cut it' and those that don't.  I've listened to hours of stuff by Christopher Hitchens, Sam Harris, and Richard Dawkins debating various people on 'God's side' and it always seems to miss the point. God is a relationship with the unknown.  Implied by that simple statement is that 1. The unknown changes.  2. It is different for different people.  3. There is always an unknown.  
The unknown, or God, is a horizon that recedes as one approaches it. GOD is a useful idea because it holds the things that I do not understand, and does not give them to someone else, like "Science", or "The Church",  "Economics", or "Medicine". Each of these baskets employs a priesthood to control the mind and the body.  "Science" is God as a charlatan who distracts with smoke and mirrors while looting our own powers of observation and deduction.  Science as "a way of knowing" should empower humans.  Whether an I-phone is empowering or not is another related topic.  The God thing goes All over the place.

The issue at hand is the Supreme Being and whether or not  He exists: back to the horizon.  
The horizon is based on a ground, a height, and a curvature; the length  of the tangent to the viewer is knowable, and changes with the other variables.  Call the length of the line "What I Know", call the tangent point the edge between known and unknown, and call the curve beyond the tangent point "God". The variables are "how high am I", in other words, how big is my view, the known expands as God seems to recede from view, thus the warnings to the faithful to avoid intellectualism and cynicism and have faith.  But all that is in the conscious realm, "above ground", so to speak.  Below ground is "Being", the solid reality that all the mental speculation orbits.  This is called "direct knowing".  It cuts to the center and eliminates speculation.  This is mysticism, since it is "below ground", the higher one goes, the further from the mystic he becomes, the gap between the scientist and the witch doctor or shaman.

 It is simple to see the validity of conscious, scientific knowing, as well as unconscious (maybe sub-conscious, or pre-conscious...etc...), mystical knowing.  Something smarter than the brain thinks before the brain becomes conscious, evidenced by skillful reactions in a car, catching one's balance, or turning a hamburger into hair and fingernails, denying this, or giving it to Science to babysit until it is solved does not make it go away!  On the other hand, culture and individual history grows out of the broad view.  Hamburgers and fingernails will never spontaneously combust into "The Council on Foreign Relations" or other mystical cabals that drive human events. This is Consciousness, which happens in time, and is the made up world of ideas that we love so much we think there must be nothing else; "true love" does this to a person. 

                  Mr. Science

 This is also the realm of manipulation and shepherding the minds of people into gods disguised as science. Like the used car salesman,"Trust me.  Would I lie?" Science-as-huckster mixes with the true way of knowing and invades our minds, stimulates choices we don't understand, and leads us away from ourselves as effectively as any religion or fake god could hope to.

So the mystery is not one at all.  God exists because I do.  He is as big as I am. He is the thing I wonder about as well as the ladder I climb to examine it.  He is as much a person as I need him to be, he is as distant from me as I am from my own ground of being.  The mature head will recognize it is connected to a real body which stands on some ground.  An immature head will float into space and wonder at its' powers of levitation, ignoring the venerable shoulders it sits on to make its lofty reflections.  Does God love me or care about the world and its misery?  Is God a solution or a savior? Can I pray to God?  etc...OR can a proportion do the things that the Old Man With A Beard used to do?  I would say "Even better". Prayer is a word that describes "going to the ground of being while expanding ones view in order to see more light". The proportion works like a machine and yet is a product of consciousness and so has the power to save.  Is a proportion sentimental about kittens , old ladies or human life? 

Getting things done, Empire-style

 No, and neither is God, evidenced by the ghastly performance of "good Christians" in spreading the so-called "gospel of love"; into Guatemala, Nicaragua, El Salvador through genocide and corporate fascism, and now Africa, the Middle East, and onward to the stars!  Every non-white person seems to deserve the love of Columbus who severed the hands of "the comely natives" if they did not bring him gold. I would take a Proportion over that demon any day. (And what random mutation set math principles anyway?) 

In summary, if you are holding your breath for a fat guy to squeeze down the chimney with a bag of toys, you will turn blue for sure.  If you proceed as though the Spirit of Love can fit itself into small spaces and expand miraculously, your breaths will become fuller and richer. Now, maybe I should take my own advice.  Amen.