Archive
Poetry Archive #2 (large sketch book)
Resistance
Stand up for your convictions
Whatever they are
Whatever obstacles stand in your way
Whatever others may think
Resistance
Feel deeply your inner strength
Let your actions serve your will
As your will strives to serve the greater good
Fear overcome is the beginning of ecstasy
Resistance
The struggle outweighs the outcome
The journey surpasses the destination
Passive acceptance is the bastion of the weak
The meek have inherited nothing
Resistance
Dare to give your life meaning
Share freely what you have experienced
Care about what really matters
Tear down obstacles to justice
Resistance
intelligent design
Intelligent Design is a feeble attempt by Creationists to hide the fact they are trying to bring religion into the public schools. Their argument is that life is complex it had to have a designer. Its not science because where is your testable hypothesis? Nonetheless it has something about it that intrigues me. I am a big believer in evolution. It is a neat theory with a lot of supporting evidence. I remember in highschool biology when a student told the teacher he didn’t believe in it and the teacher scoffed and said he’d seen it in the lab. Mostly the anti-evolutionists don’t like evolution because it takes away our specialness. There is seemless and corroborating evidence from genetics, linguistics, and archeology that humanity left Africa 50,000 years ago and spread across the globe. I like the idea of the big bang happening 18 billion years ago and all the scientific evidence points to that. The fact that we are on one middling planet, circling a middling sun, in the backwaters of a middling galaxy is pretty cool and far weirder than any creation myth folks came up. But life is complex as is the universe. Complexity lends itself to intelligence. Even cities organize themselves intelligently, more user friendly than those developed by central planners. Bees do it, ants do it without any centralized authority. We call this process emergence, when intelligence naturally arises out of random simple processes. I do believe there is intelligence in our design but that does not necessarily mean there is a designer. I believe the design itself is intelligent and in that sense i do believe in intelligent design.
i like sarah pailin
She seems energetic and fun and did some good with some of her power. Seems to have done less harm than a lot of other politicians. Obviously we have some major philosophical differences and i am not going to vote for her ticket but i won’t shed any tears for missing Joe Biden either. She apparently can think of herself as a feminist. She’d break the 43 and 0 white guy VP streak, and would be a big step up from Dick Cheney. It was a bold move by McCain that turned the race around. I am finding the vitriol the left spews at her kind of grating and certainly shrill. The VP is an attack dog role so i don’t begrudge her her lumps. If you live by the mean mouth you should be prepared to die by it. I just am tired of being exposed to it. Its annoying. If everyone wasn’t being so mean she might say more and i bet it would be funny. She seems like she’s got an isolated inbred reactionary world view punched up with suburban chic. I bet her schtick would be hilarious if she just got to put it out there. She obviously resonates with some folks and not just the right wing base. Obama took the safe way out with Biden, thats what frontrunners do. I had hoped he would try to rise above the politics he claims to decry but they both are running on scripts i’ve heard before. I’m not rooting for mccain-pailin but i’m not rooting against her. it seems mean spirited for a white guy. i wish her well.
WET Zero
Since i got a compliment on my post on the Western Esoteric Tradition i decided to post another. The core of wet is numbers as fundamental bases on which everything else is built on. The WET built their system on the Hebrew Tree of Life. It is fairly complex to explain and i can’t claim to know all of its intricacies but i pretty much know how it works. Everything begins with what is normally depicted as three arcs representing nothingness, the nothingness of nothingness, and the nothingness of nothingness of nothingness. There are prettier names for it the light, the limitless light, and the mirror of limitless light, i believe. We might want to think of say a gas tank, it could be empty – containing nothingness, or non-existent and not just non-present, or it could even be impossible a deeper state of empty. I put this in for the sake of completion not claiming to be able to fully appreciate it in any practical way.
You can also think about things starting with zero. An interesting number mathematically and philosophically having more in common with infinity than any number imaginable. It helps us to imagine the infinite. It is the nothingness of freedom from desire, akin with Nirvana. In Tarot, or The Book of Thoth which i prefer, it is represented by The Fool. Traditionally depicted as a hermaphroditic youth dressed as a jester preparing to step off a clif with a little dog barking in the background. In Haiku form:
Fool walks towards the cliff
not hearing the warning cry
Fool does not need to
We think of nothingness as the potentiality of everything. This works on a practical level as a point of meditation. There is an emptiness that comes with meditation. If you have ever felt it, it is akin to being one with everything. An experience i can’t hope to describe. Which is why archetypes have power. Recognizing the Fool as Parsifal from the Grail legend helps us see the zero as innocence rather than ignorance and a lack of self consciousness to freely do the next right thing naturally and without effort.
Poetry Archive #1 (behavior mod. notebook 03-04)
unfinished novel page 25
(circa 2003)
don’t want to lose people
in unimportant details
but must establish
an understandable framework
to launch new memes.
as the only way to get
over the sun
enter Archetype Heaven
Unique Universal Knowledge
constructs contain ego-energy
we walk long swordblades
immutable in their truth
infinitely cruel
a tool of severity
excising kindness blob
of easy indifference to cancer
###############
selection from unpublished novel
Mitch is cold and dissatisfied with winter. a defuse chill that has begun to ache in its familiarity begetting contempt for himself and consequently the universe. He’s thinking about mirror shots and what they mean in movies, television, mitch’s mind. Watching from the outside not in a peeping tom kind of way but a stolen glance of a private place, in a public space. He has to watch to know. data collection. focus group testing, personal science. grist for the mill of mitch’s mind. working not the subconscious calculus of the thrown ball but its close kin….applied
the western esoteric tradition
Usually I say something else when someone asks my spiritual tradition but of them all this one most resonates with me though i see powerful truths in all traditions. The Western Esoteric Tradition (WET) encompasses a number of other traditions, and potentially all of them. In its most advanced form Aleister Crowley put together a table of correspondence that includes 20 or so different faiths, systematized according to the kabalistic tree of life. It identifies a meta-thought to see the same universal truths conveyed in each traditions variety. I’ve hardly met anyone who also looks at the world this way and those i have i’ve largely thought had a cartoonish and slightly silly hold on it. For me its more of a philosophy, a lens through which to view the universe, something to be felt mystically and powerfully, but perhaps not ritualistically.
Moving to the specific might clarify some of this. The WET is heavily tied into the jewish mystical tradition. The Hebrews believed the name of God was divine and could not be spoken and was used in a number of different ways. That name in english is YHVH, in Hebrew Yod He Vau He, or Window Hand Knife Hand. Some WET practices involve a lot of this and one I got from Israel Regardie has been especially meaningful to me. It involves vibrating each of the letters of the name, feeling them in you as you silently project them out and visualize them going to the end of the universe and feeling the echo as it bounces back empowered by the vibrations of the godhood. He also recommends a specific posture that i think of as Pharoahnic standing stiffly right arm at your side left arm bent with your left finger in front of your lips like your shushing someone. In Garden of Pomegranits, i think, he writes what to do after this: “Standing quietly in this sign (the finger over the lips posture) I meditate upon the spiritual value, involved in the nature of The Name I have used, and it dawns upon my mind, by direct perception, an understanding and a wide wide sympathy, for that spiritual power”. This to me is a spiritual exercise type of prayer. One of a vast mosaic of practical prayer techniques. I have found it immensely profound on an experiential level. I write about this because when i talk to people about prayer and i do it seems 99% of what people talk about are just one sided conversations asking for stuff in words and sometime being thankful, again words, laundry lists, with or without feeling. Nothing wrong with that, i do that to, but “to pray without ceasing” seems to be a laudatory goal. Connections are what make us human, conscious. Mostly i think “cut wood and carry water” prayer of living and working in the Tao. But there are times when more seems in order.
I largely feel, not misunderstood, but certainly ununderstood. This blog is largely my attempt to remedy that. If anyone is interested i will post more on WET. I am happy to address any questions, critiques, or topics of interest.
whats up
I was scanning the archive list and saw i’ve hit every month since i started. It seems like i’ve hardly put up anything when i think of all the things i’d like to say but haven’t. I did some editing on going crazy part 6, strengthening the ending mostly. I haven’t gotten a lot of comments on the series and i know it makes some people uncomfortable. It is a story i like to tell though. The most transformative time of my life and i’ve lived in continuous transition. I only settle down now as constant transition is static. I have been blessed to see significane and meaning in what i do pretty universally. Sometimes in the moment i lose that, working for dr tod and with cortez i felt that way, also as a case manager for folks with developmental disabilities. But even in those eras, for me a year or two in more objective time i had these tremendous moments; the call from guy whose color blindness was cured by cannabis, mastering batterer intervention, teaching a sociopath to feel, getting an agoraphobic out of the house after 3 years so she could go to her son’s graduation, doing cutting edge stuff with autism. But mostly i allowed the routine of it all to override the joy. Mostly because intensity has its costs. These days, this era, I am more intense. I am more conscious of what i have learned and what i am doing. I am more engaged less detached and more heavily invested. Not bound but tied certainly.
Multiconstruct 
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