From The Inside Out

I wrote the paragraph below this morning in response to a post on the Thomas group:
_

Maybe I'm saying that whatever consciousness God MAY have is not the sort of consciousness homo sapiens consider to be what consciousness is. Maybe what consciousness is to God doesn't require a human invention like the various languages to KNOW why humans invented language. With the question for me being: Did we invent language in order to understand what God is or simply to understand how life on Earth relates to whatever sort of creative or destructive forces there are beyond our own. 
_

I don't quite understand the second sentence and why I used it to segue to a short rap about human languages. I do like the question I asked by the ti-me I got there.

I just glanced up to the TV (which is just to the left of my computer monitor), and there was a video with our new Governor-elect, Bev Perdue. I don't like it. I don't like the idea of a woman being governor or acting like a man, anymore then I like encountering men who act like women. I was raised in The South and to be Jim Crow, but I found it easier to vote for a black man than for Hillary Clinton. I would have voted Independent again to avoid the whole situation, and give myself an out for refusing to vote for a woman. But, I felt a deep sense of history at work with Obama, and I wanted to be part of that from the inside out.

The problem I have with not liking women is that I don't love men. If I were born homosexual, that would explain everything, but I wasn't. Maybe I''ve progressed to a distaste for seeing people through the gender gap. I sort of became that gap when I asked for and received a vasectomy. I just didn't wanna deal with the problems brought into play by procreation which can appear to be the only dance of life. Even that was decided by women.

A table full of women and a bottle of whisky and a game of truth or dare in the very center of the women's liberation movement in the late Seventies and early Eighties. The specific subject of this game was whether or my then-wife was going to tell me she didn't want to have any more babies. Either with me or with anybody else. I'm guessing the way the game went, one of the circle of women around that table was chosen, or she more likely volunteered, to come over to where I was sitting watching the dancers, and tell me the truth of what my wife truly wanted me to know, but was afraid to mention.

I immediately agree that this was cool with me, but I always begin with a lie. It's easier to apologize later if what I agreed to didn't work out. I knew I had time before she could arrange to get her tubes tied. This second-hand announcement wasn't as fresh an idea as the me-singer (messenger) believed it to be.

In the coming weeks I reflected on what was at hand. I cared very much if my then-wife got her tubes tied, and then flipped that over to question what I really cared about. What I found kind of surprised me. Here was the perfect opportunity for me to find out how being infertile affected my spiritual quest. It was what I considered a "no blame" situation.

I was wrong. I don't want to reverse anything, but I was wrong because I didn't consider the consequences, and indeed, could not have. It was like with my remembering vision, I couldn't have known what to prey for to accomplish the end result. I never even considered that something like my remembering vision could be stalked. In turn, I couldn't have known what removing my ability to procreate would do to how I perceive life as I once knew it.

The persona I developed to make myself a viable contender for the favors of impregnable women didn't make any sense to me any more. The bottom line reason supporting my procreative activities became non-existent with the snip of a pair of surgical scissors. The ends were folded back and tied off. The incision was sewn up, and I became a neutered person.

I was no longer the person my then-wife lived with for two years before we married, and I was no long the person who impregnated her, and I was no longer the man who sired our children. I couldn't be. The personality I created through mimicry to be-co-me those persons I formerly acted like did not work for what amounted to me being a castrado.

One of the results of my receiving a vasectomy was that I became very angry. I didn't really understand why. I think I know why now. I felt betrayed. I wanted her to stop me. When, for whatever reason she didn't, it was too late. The die was cast.

In the new persona I've put together over the last forty years the eunuch bit has somewhat removed my desire to blame her to blaming women in general for the direction my life has taken. I had a strong, overpowering mother, and two older air-sign sisters who thought my water-sign mother was weak, and they practiced being strong to establish their own identities beginning with me to start the ball rolling.

I chose two women (or quite possibly chosen) who were both named after their fathers, and all of my legitimate children are female. Three above, two in between, and three after. It's too late now, but I think a marriage might have worked better with a more passive woman who didn't constantly challenge me to live up to what their fathers meant to them. Fat chance... eh?

Critters

Speaking of Aquarians and how to identify them on the wing, it's their clothes. When you find out a person is an Aquarius for whatever reason, watch that person and how they dress. The more of them you can keep an eye on the merrier.

You have to remember they're the opposite sign of Leo (who can be ultra showy and loves, LOVES shiny objects) and look for more subtle hints that have to do with color and shade. Everything they wear points up, either by contrast or design to something you can recognize across a crowded room. They may not be Aquarians by sun sign, but by disposition. Their Moon or Ascending sign or both may be Aquarius.

A lot of people born in the early Sixties had lots of different Sun signs, but everybody in that generational stellium had 5-6 planets in Aquarius for nearly a year or more. They would be around their mid-forties now. You can tell by the clothes, but you need lots of samples to get accurate in the Age Of Aquarius.

They're not always pretty or carry that All-American look of any race or creed. Some people are born cute and stay that way for the rest of their lives. Aquarius used to be ruled by Saturn and was considered a part of Capricorn. That's a good thing to keep in mind when you're considering antidisestablishmentarianism. I've seen 'em wear filthy clothes and not take baths for weeks.

They be-co-me with the opposite of what they themselves consider positive, idealistic, and on the up and up, and intentionally so. You might be taking your own life in your hands if you try to save them from themselves. If you try to do the same thing they would do unto you. Which is a huge enigma, and fatal at times.

They're obsessed with "the look" both pro and con. When they get like this you might as well disregard everything they utter and try to find the careactor they disrespect in themselves. As brilliant as Aquarians can be, they're just as dumb and sometime the dumbest people in the world, even unto themselves. Truly fascinating critters.

My steroid medicine came in the mail today. I didn't debate with myself about when to start taking it. Hah! I've already started. I was really glad to get it today. It would be another two full days before even the possibility of it showing up in Monday's mail delivery. They don't come until 4:30 in the afternoon now. I only thought I was a desperate man in the past.

Rainey called me while he was driving to Greensboro. We had only talked for a little while, and I had to ask for us to hang up because I found it impossible to hold the telephone up to my ear. I had to ask for help from my sister-in-law to stand up from a low chair at her house for Thanksgiving. This is getting to be embarrassing. Maybe the prednisone will give me some relief for a while. I'm becoming more of a cranky old man then ever.

Singing Through The Pain

The only choice I've ever had about how I was gonna die and the conditions of my death have been to consider suicide. All the same, I have always tried to keep in mind that I would eventually die of something, I just didn't and still don't know what. In any case I've never felt comfortable with the idea of stretching life out as much as I could with a long, slow, painful death. I may have had that option taken away from me with this rheumatoid arthritis gig.

The free movement of my body is gone. There is hardly anything I can do that don't hurt something but sitting still, and that's truly a blessing. My doctor warned me there is a problem with that. I don't get any aerobic exercise and that's not good for my heart health.

I've been thinking about how I can get some aerobic action that doesn't hurt to much, and it appears as though my best option is singing. I've been doing that fairly regularly for the last week or so.

I went out for a walk earlier just to move things around a little. It was not a long walk nor speedy. I realized I was breathing real shallow, and started singing some chants and voice exercises I learned during my voice training lessons back in my twenties and thirties to get my breathing rate up. It worked a little too well, and I got tired and headed back to my front deck where I have a chair to sit in.

I sat in that folding chair and practiced singing any tune I could remember any part of. Finally I remembered a tune that I knew all the words to the first verse and chorus. The problem with that was that it was a popular song, and anybody who might be listening would know whether I was hitting the right notes or not.

It wasn't like I was giving a concert and been expected to have practiced enough not to make simple mistakes. I was singing to move a bunch of air through my lungs, and thus get some oxygen to my heart so it would work right. I forget most of the time now that I've quit smoking tobacco, that is until I sing. It's been over a year now, and my lungs are a lot cleaner than they've been in a long time. Comparatively, I can take some pretty deep breaths.

Another thing about my taking up singing regularly again is how the range and depth of my voice increases. Now that I have my digital piano to practice with I can tell just how much lower or higher I can reach up and down the scales as time goes by. This gives my voice a lot more flexibility for imitating other people's voices. If I do it right, and they don't see me moving my lips, it's possible that they will hear me say what I utter, as if it were them talking to themselves in a segue situation. Granted, for this to happen, I have to abandon my own idea of self and be-co-me with their own impressions of they self in real ti-me (tie-to-me). Tricky business, but something to do when there is nothing I can do but that.

No One But Me

My younger brother who is close to 65 years old, took the visiting nephews and nieces for a kayaking trip this morning. I left my warm coat over at my youngest brother's house next door and they were all gathered up to leave when i arrived. I went inside to get my coat and was convinced to stay a while by the offer of breakfast and some gourmet coffee.

The big meal is supposed to happen around two this afternoon. I'll probably go over for a little while and eat a little. I don't like being around other people generally, but with this 24/7 pain I really don't like it. Other people being around prevents me from screeching when I do something that hurts, and there ain't much left I can do that doesn't. At my house I can scream out in pain, and that seems to help. Also, I get the feeling my presence is a downer for the others, especially on a day of celebration.

Not much e-mail this morning. Why would there be? It's Thanksgiving Day, and all the net freaks are forced to pay attention to their families or be humiliated by their indifference. I get the feeling that a lot of the people who spend as much time as I do in front of their monitor as I do feel a little embarrassed they're hooked. If I had not taken some sort of unconscious vow of poverty I might move around a little more. As it is I can't afford to.

I could probably afford to move around more than I do, but I don't seem motivated enough to get up and go do something different. Going over to the closest regional city where they have a lot more amenities for entertaining oneself turns out for me to be the same ol'/same ol', and I get a little upset for going over there just to do the same useless crap I did the last time I was over there.

I did myself.
I am is a beautiful thing,
an addition to the Whole
that is Me.
For without my Self,
there would be no thing else,
without Me,
the world wouldn't be.

So, I walk down the street
with a gleam in my eye,
and a definite "Go to hell" look.
Because, the feelings I got
come from loving my Self,
and they didn't come
outta no Book.

My emotions I feel,
and my feelings I know,
and my rapport
is thicker than smoke.
I'm the outside in,
and the inside out,
and "Fuck you! ...
if you can't take a joke!"

The above poem is one of the few I composed rather than took down as dictation. What I've attempted to capture with this poem is a certain attitude that I need to be able to reach for when I fall for the same old tricks that work just about every time with me. It's designed to work with repetition and redundancy. I've recited this poem, mostly to myself, tens of thousands of times.

All of my poetry is about attitudes that seem to work for me when nothing else will. I have my favorites because they so consistently assist me in coping with situations I seem stuck in through ti-me. Nobody knows but me that I'm using self-generated enchantment to change the way I react to the way the world is or merely seems.

Have a fruitful Thanksgiving, Barbara. Thanks for the card.

Lessons From The Dark Side

My oldest sister's son and his brood got here around one o'clock this morning. They had three dogs with them. My brother's dogs went nuts. The visitor's dogs went nuts. It was a nutty night with lots and lots of barking and snarling and not necessarily the making of dog friends. That's why I don't keep pets, much less mouthy dogs that bark at their own shadow. We do live on the edge of a fair-sized swamp that includes the mucky flood plains of the Coharie River. The dogs sometime bark at real things that go bump in the night.

These coastal plains swamps are the "flyways" of the various land-bound animals including the black bears and other scary things. There are big boar raccoons that follow the swamps that are as big or bigger than a fair-sized hound, and will take on a pack of dogs all by themselves and win. Arrogant bastards who will generally slip away from a human confrontation, but not always. These coastal swamps were made famous in the Revolutionary War by General Marion, the Swamp Fox. He knew how to hold 'em, and to fold 'em, and most importantly, when to run away.

I'm not a river rat, but my younger brother is. He's leading a kayaking/canoe trip down one of the local rivers for the visiting nephews before the big Thanksgiving meal. I'm happy to have a legitimate excuse to get out of it. It's all too apparent to me that Mother Nature has been trying to off me from the bejinning. Why go asking for trouble?

I do know a little more about the swamps than the average fellow because of the longevity of my visits there. My family owns land on both sides of the river, and over the years I've had to move around through them. I'm not much of a fisherman and certainly not a duck hunter. I have fished for my supper because I like to eat fish, but I wouldn't give you a plugged nickel for a plate of duck. I would rather than starve, but I'm usually gonna find me something else to eat than waterfowl.

I've had more than one chance to learn to like eating goose. Once at a 12-course gourmet meal with a prize-winning chef at the helm. He was famous for cooking geese and ducks. Fortunately each of the twelve courses came with a plentiful supply of various wines, and the stuffing was delicious.

Sea Sickness And Miracle Drugs

It was raining when I went to bed last night. The room I put my bed in temporarily is what I made into a room instead of an open balcony. I just put a roof over what used to be a balcony, and put up walls to dry it in. The roof over the old balcony is not regular room height. It's less that 8 feet (2.44 M). The top of the mattress I sleep on is around 2-3 feet above the floor... what I'm trying to say is that the roof the rainwater hits is 3-4 feet above my face. It's almost like sleeping in a hard-shelled tent. Not quite like sleeping under a tin roof when it's raining, but the next best thing. Very soothing.

I'm sleeping a little better these days. I've never had much trouble sleeping. I've had to learn to go to sleep in some very strange places that had no locked doors between me and the random beta world. The problem I've had has to do with the arthritic pain in my shoulders that doesn't allow me to roll over on to my side easily.

They don't call this dis-ease rheumatoid for nothing. Rheuma is a Greek word for "flow". Rheumatoid means the pain and aching moves around in my body. Two weeks ago it was my right shoulder that was the problem with me rolling over in bed, but the last week or so it's been my left shoulder. Every joint in my body has had it's own turn in tormenting me.

Last Tuesday and this morning I took the medicine methotrexate as prescribed. My rhuematologist described the possible side effects of nausea and vomiting. After I took the medicine last Tuesday I did have some nausea, but no vomiting. He told me not to expect any perceivable results for a while, because unlike the steroid prednisone, it works over the long haul.

I haven't been taking any other medication but ibuprofen or naproxen (and one series of prednisone a few weeks ago) until I took the methotrexate last week, so when I begin to feel a little less pain in my shoulders when I rolled over in bed I felt like I could safely attribute it to the methotrexate even though it was early to expect any noticeable results.

The nausea I felt after I had taken this new medicine didn't exactly encourage me to look forward to taking it again today, as I will every week for a while. But, the little bit of relief I think I'm feeling in my shoulders did make me look forward to taking the increased dosage today, even though I'll have to deal with the nausea anyway. When my doctor talked to me over the phone last week he mentioned that the nausea may be less of a problem over time. Frankly, it was rather odd to view my eagerness to swallow those pills which are going to make me feel nauseated.

It's not the first time I've put stuff in my body that might or was likely to make me sick and puke. I have a virtual history of it. That's what happens when you tune in, turn on, and drop out. A lot of experimentation goes on to find out what needs to be there for a seeker to get over the hump.

Recently, not a day goes by that I don't see further evidence that the real meaning of my remembering vision is about the installation of an extended database of past life experiences. The same mechanics and dynamics of evolving into a more complex life form has always been the sa-me. I'm satisfied each of us take our evolutionary history with us from body to body as we build them for ourselves as ti-me goes by.

There is nothing fancy or particularly mysterious going on like I anticipated there might be. It's just that after I was imbued with a conscious awareness of how this extended database got installed or had always been there out of reach for me consciously. I started acting like it had always been there for me to use, and I may have been using it all along sight unseen, but the tilting point came when I became consciously aware that it was part and parcel of the all of me I've come to be.

As I pointed out in a recent entry, the most significant aspect of be-co-me-ing consciously aware of being possessed by this experiential database is how people began to approach me rather than me having to seek people out. It really caught me off-guard and I didn't rightly know how to cope with this reversal of fortunes.

People started gathering around me for reasons I didn't understand, because previous to my remembering vision I was a silent, sneaky member in ill standing in the periphery of most cultural events. Suddenly, it's like I'm in a sort of spot light that revealed my devious, obsessive ways, and a genius for compartmentalization.

My remembering vision is not the only time I've become consciously aware of more extended databases of a different sort. There are other realities and other gifts are bestowed in the unveiling of them. I received the gift of gnosis, but possess other gifts and recognize many more in others, sometimes even when they don't.

It can be a battle royale to get them to recognize they're possessed by gifts they use constantly, however dimly lit their apperception displays them. The older I get the less interested I am in their finding out at all. They always bite the hand that feeds them. No blame.

Here's the only whiz kid left who sat at Einstein's knee as his devotee has got to say about the Gospel of Thomas saying about hating your parents:

Lukan version:



man date l'waty w'la SANE l'abuhy w'l'immeh w'l'axwateh w'l'attateh 
w'labenawhy wap l'napseh talmidda la mishkach dihwe wate batary



"Whoever comes to me and does not set aside his father and his mother, 
brothers and sisters, his wife and children, even his own life, cannot be my 
disciple."



Jack Kilmon

I keep telling Jack that he's unworthy to translate these sayings because he unredeemably loves his parents, and thus never achieved individuation or his own identity as a homo sapiens. Does he listen? No, why would he? Only recently has he admitted he's beginning to understand my style of sarcasm, and maybe I'm just beginning to understand his mastery of multiple systems of expertise works just fine for him. He's much too gullible to not grow where he's planted. 


Shopping For A Costume Shop Mitre

Another person is enraged at me and accusing me of being them. It's about how I clarified the difference between a system of expertise and a gift of God. I believe they consider that to be true whether it screws with their plans for the future or no. They might have to go back to square One to straighten their own way of being out. This person has received gnosis, but chose their highly developed systems of expertise over their gift from God. Nobody wants to know that when they're heavily invested in the former. It makes them real mad. No blame.

I'm borrowing again from the Jung quote about how what one's real religion is, organized or no, is building and maintaining a defense against their experience of God. In this person's case it oughta be real easy to figure out what drove him to become a karate and self-defense expert with all sorts of ribbons and buttons and bows. Whatever experience did drive him to religiously develop this sort of defense system is what God is to him. It's not the sa-me God that imbued him with the gift of gnosis, which is at the root of his anger at me.

The Me is a hell of a thing to be angry at. Nobody wins by getting angry with me. But, I would say that, wouldn't I. '-)

If you read yesterday's entry you might recognize that this guy's anger results from me realizing I've done that myself. I was given this gift during my remembering vision of a extensive personal experiential database that I started using immediately, but didn't recognize it for what it was or respect it the way I should have respected it by using it in exclusivity.

I actually couldn't have. I didn't know what happened was a gift of the very thing I'd been looking for. I kept on looking. It wasn't so much that I was ungrateful. I'll never forget the high points of my remembering vision. That's how I knew it was a vision rather than a dream.

I dreamed of being in some dire situation last night in a dream. I don't remember the situation so much as how it was resolved. I showed up in a Spider man costume, opened the top of my head (which was hinged apparently), and a small motherboard with vacuum tubes appeared, as a powerfully convincing voice said something to the effect that the dire situation I'd just experienced couldn't be all that bad, if I could take my brain out and play with it, so I did. I, robot, all over again.

The colors were exotically beautiful in this dream. The skin tight suit didn't really cover my aging old body, but that of a younger me. Even before I woke up good enough to make my fourth trip to the bathroom to pee, I calculated that the dream was confirming my suspicion that I was a spirit looking for a human experience, rather than being a human looking for a spiritual experience.

I like to compare the careactor of Jesus with Charles Manson and see what happens.

Charles Manson reputedly never killed anybody. His followers did because they thought doing that would please Charley. I've had followers willing to kill people for me. I only found out about it just in time to stop it. They wanted to surprise me. They wanted to do what they thought would be best for me in my nayme.

You might not wanna put yourself in the position of causing weird people to assume that they can do things that might surprise you in your not-me (name).

 It would take a charismatic to understand the dynamic through experience. I think it would take being in the position of having people offer to do stuff nobody else would do, for the ordinary person to understand what a giddy feeling power can be. A person can prepare for a lot of things, but probably not suddenly becoming a rock and roll star or becoming the President of the United States in your forties. But having it happen on the individual level and with empty hands can be very unexpected and made me feel stupid. 

When I had my remembering vision and started using the newly installed database that came with it people suddenly started approaching me and treating me special. Special according to them. They didn't seem to know why they were doing what they did any more than I did, so they just worked up something special they thought might get them through the encounter to find out why they were curious about me. 

This whole deal might have come out better if I hadn't have been pretty much of a sex addict for the previous ten years, and it was an open secret. I was doing a lotta things on the sly I certainly did not wanna advertise, so I went through the motions of being a moderately successful married guy who liked to drink and probably fucked around on his wife, but it was a cover up for a lot more than that. 

I'm not going to explain or rationalize my sex addiction. It ended. It had too. Instead of me sneaking around to find people as addicted as I was to have sex with, people started approaching me to offer something of themselves to me, and naturally, I chose to have sex with them. This went on for a few years, but I kept getting accused of taking advantage of them in ways that were not consistent with what I thought I was taking advantage of them for. The swore they openly approached me for other reasons, and I didn't really know what those reasons were. 

I began giving them a reason to approach me. I automatically set up some rules of procedure to make it easy to do. I began reading palms. Free if need be. Cheap at any price. I always needed the money, but that wasn't the point. I wanted to hold hands with people and find out what they wanted from me. What I found out was that I had nothing to give.

The Bumps That Thumped

Sometime when I'm contemplating that Jung quote about what he thought religion amounted to I think literally of the way God was represented to me through the efforts of the Protestant religious organizations that surrounded me growing up, even into the depths of my home. I heard it said that in the county my family lived the longest while I was a kid, there were only maybe 400 people out of 50,000 that were of other religions than Protestant. Maybe 200 Catholics. I knew one personally. He didn't seem all that evil. A Damn Yankee, but smart for coming and staying. Why would they not? My people fought for the right to live here. Four seasons, but moderate winters. No earthquakes and only an occasional tornado, but hurricanes have the mojo on us. 

My formative years wuz just et up with Bible thumpers. I think my early religious training was the God I had to learn to defend myself against religiously. Shockingly, that really has been my real religion. Defending my right to play God with my own life. Somebody is going to do it. Why not me? The truth of it is that nobody knows. They really don't. Nobody knows I'm actively, eagerly, playing God with my own life. When they perceive me, if ever, they just see what they'd be doing if they were me. Since I know that, why would I not play to their innate dispositions? I didn't study acting for nothing. They correct my migration flight from the ground I fly over them with. That's right. I take my ground of being with me. It's my carryon luggage. Since it's doable, I'd be crazy not to. Are you with me people?

I didn't know what I was fighting FOR. I damned sure knew I was trying desperately to keep them from convincing me I belonged in the pigeon hole they selected for me. I knew that! Maybe I was surreptitiously seeking a pigeon-hole of my own, and they were just trying to help, but I honestly don't think they understood that I was attempting to establish my own personality for my own reasons. Worse, I didn't either. 

I couldn't have prayed to happen what I saw and experienced in my remembering vision a half lifetime ago. I never imagined anything like that was possible. I wouldn't have known what to pray for. Even when I got what I got I didn't know what I had. I would have to live at least as long as I already had to find out, and I didn't know for sure it would ever become clear and lucid even then. Again, I didn't know what to prey for. 

That's why it HAD to be unearned and undeserved. If I had worked for it, I wouldn't have know what the goal would have to be to inspire me for half a lifetime. A half of a lifetime totally obsessed with what I didn't know would kill me if it didn't save me. 

Red Roses For A Shady Lady

This is some pretty heady stuff for me. This black hole stuff. This what I described as a pearl-like looking entity being hollow in the center with radiant spokes coming out of it, but only for a certain distance, and that upon looking at such a configuration from the outside the finite end of those radiant spokes gave the object the look of an oyster pearl with it's deep luminescence.

Later I read some articles on how black holes work, and it made me wonder if what I've been describing as what looks like a pearl is not a teeny tiny black hole. My descriptions of what I purportedly "saw" in vision seem very consistent with the Hawking description of a black hole radiating a luminous ring around it. He and Penrose got awards for figuring that out.

This morning I was looking for the Wikipedia article on Hawking through Google, and the drop down list of possibles displayed a link to this web site:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hawking_radiation

and at the bottom of the article there was this link:

http://cerncourier.com/cws/article/cern/29199

Reading stuff like this is very important to me poetically, because it shows me that poetically ain't the only way to fly. It's obvious to me that these scientists are interested in the same topics I am, but their descriptive lingo seems to make them think they got exclusivity on what's wot. That's wot I'm trying to avoid. Claiming exclusivity is a fool's game. The more you fight it, the mo' bettah it's gone whip yo' ass. Even that doesn't matter compared to death as the final solution.

I think the one thing most people fear about what they'll lose by dying is their personality. In my death encounters it was the first thing to go, and in it's parting took the only tools for coping with extreme situations I am had with it (I am is __, is the personality). The personality is all a soul has as a defense against their experience of God.

An e-mail post reminded me of a little ditty we used to sing in Sunday School when I was a little boy:

"Give me oil in my lamp
keep me burning.
Give me oil in my lamp 
I pray.
Give me oil in my lamp
now just keep me on burning.
Keep me burning 'til the break of day.

I will make you fishers of meN 
if you'll only follow ME,
Hallelujah! What a savior!
I'm from sin set, you're from sin set,
We're all from sin set free."

I understand the oil prayer. It's that "fishers of men" bit that gets me to wondering. To my shock and dismay there appears to be other ways of be-co-me-ing than taking a vow of poverty and otherwise living like a beggar. It's taken me a lifetime to figure that out. Why come 'I am is' IS always the last to know? Why isn't gnowing something good enow? Most people who think of themselves as regular people are pedantic assholes! They may graduate, but they never get out of school. They never get to be grown-ups and do thangs on impulse just because they wanna. They're assholes I tell ya'. Walking around the streets like free men. There oughta be a law against being an asshole. That would solve a lot of environmental problems. 

I think 'I am is' may have been hanging around with the wrong poop peddlers when he matriculated to imitating them in his latest effort to create himself as a superior man. How can he be-co-me in unexpected, opportune moments without attracting attention to what he feels like he needs to do to make the ritual a done deal, in order to operate out some other's me like it was just another of the local spaceports? I think maybe this "attention-grabbing" while making that inward transition is one of those trans-dimensional patterns that appears to require caution in any other space/time continuum we unwittingly wander into in order to amuse ourselves or to divert our murky attention. 

The Day Before The House Burned Down

I've been very self-absorbed today.The nausea from the new medicine didn't go away overnight. Neither did the pain in my joints. I think they're partly sore from having so many tiny little holes shot through them via the radiation from the x-rays. The pain-killers they gave me at the Durham VA is a little better, but they're fighting a losing battle. I've gone out for a couple of walks today. They weren't hard-core cardiovascular exercises, but maybe just better than nothing.

I'm starting to do two things I enjoyed doing in the past. Singing and dancing. I use the drum machine on my digital piano to set the pace for both activities. I haven't been playing the piano as much, but I have been using the drum machine feature about every day, especially for dancing.

The singing is really about chanting. The only letters in the alphabet that can literally be "sung" is the vowels. The consonants are used to chop the singing of the vowel up into pieces. I sing the vowels using various consonants as headers. La-le-li-lo-lu. Ba-be-bi-bo-bu. Like that. I sing the scales using each vowel in a variety of ways. Nobody hears me, so I do what I want.

I don't remember the words to many of the songs I knew in the past. Mostly snatches and pieces here and there. I remember nursery rhymes and Sunday School songs even better than the songs I wrote myself. The songs I learning taking voice lessons are almost all forgotten. I haven't forgotten the lessons though. They were learned piecemeal and in a hardscrabble fashion. I sing the Asian mantra Om Ne Padme Om. I write Asian because I don't remember whether it's Buddhist or Hindu. Maybe neither. Doing it really opens my voice up though.

My rheumatologist from the VA at Durham just called me. I was surprised. I thought he was a salesman and nearly hung up on him. He's gonna prescribe me some steroids for the pain. He says I got other troubles in my knee and hip. No treatment for it. Oh, joy. He practically told me I'm gonna be a total cripple soon, but candidly I wasn't listening all that closely. I could smell what he was saying over the telephone.

Planet Shopping

It's not like I didn't have to go through orientation when I went to test for a job at the nuclear power plant down in Southport, North Carolina. There were safety meeting where they explained that radiation from these elements don't slow down for or even recognize yo' body is standing there. They say humans can ignore that tiny little holes are being machine-gunned through your body at first. Through bone, blood, tissue of every sort. That's what happens when a body is exposed to radiation. If the source of radiation or the human body one or the other isn't removed from each other's presence, it's gonna cook your flesh like you were in a microwave oven, and the stronger the source of radiation is, the faster the flesh will melt off your riddled bones. It's considered an unlovely demise.

That's what I was thinking about yesterday when the radiologist took multiple x-rays from multiple angles of my hands, elbows, shoulders, knees, and hips. Tiny little holes that has to be repaired by an alert immune system. Then I come home, and this morning when I should be recuperating from being shot full of tiny little holes, I imbibed six pills of methotrexate which weakens the immune system. They're trying to kill me so there will be some social security funds left to pay to their generation.

I wanna live to see China start making Beijing the hub of the Asian and European continents. If they're so big and rich they oughta take over the responsibility of being policing the world, and let the American taxpayer start putting his own money into his own pocket, or at least into mine. China can drive to just about anywhere in the world but the Western Hemisphere continents and Australia. Africa is a lot closer to them than to us. Let China settle their petty quarrels. They're right next door to all those Muslim countries. Let China take on al Qaeda and the Taliban. They can drive there from China at less expense. They have billions of people. Just send a hundred million or so to every country that ends in "stan" and that will be the end of that.

If they told a hundred million raving communist Chinese devotees to go to Italy and live off the land there, and they would support them. It wouldn't be long before there wasn't a blade of grass left on the entire peninsula despite the huge piles of human shit steaming on every street corner and oozing off into the Mediterranean on both sides like lava flows. Now, just what the hell could the Italian government or the Pope do about that. They'd run outta bullets and crucifixes first, and probably start holding mass in Mandarin. No blame.

It's a matter of roads. Roads, roads, roads. I predict that it won't be long, relatively, before there is an engineered train track from Beijing to Berlin, with spur tracks going to every capital in Eurasia. Unless some plague rearranges the populations of the Earth, that's the way it's gonna be. It wouldn't surprise me if these sucker drill and hole straight through the center of the Earth and install a big elevator.

China built a supertrain railroad to Lhasa, Tibet. An air-conditioned supertrain that goes straight to the top of the world. They could build a track like that straight to Kabul, and send tens of millions of people to occupy Afghanistan in days without any weapons at all. Just instruct them to go live there, and if they managed to stay five years they'd give the the land they lived on.

It just wouldn't be that hard to believe if you watched the opening ceremonies of the Olympics in Beijing. Their ability to micromanage large numbers of people in events that required great precision astounded me, and that was over television halfway around the world. It wouldn't be much of a challenge to them to build a railway to Kabul that was level from one end to the other.

I'm imagining this huge machine reminiscent of the ones they built to dig the Chunnel between England and France. I don't have a clue what it might have to look like, but it would have these whirling blades that ground through everything in front of it including mountains. Political borders don't work so good if there are huge roads built for people to travel in and out of some place.

I encountered a story somehow about something that happened in South America in one of the countries that straddle the Andes Mountains. There were apparently vast areas of rich farm land on the eastern side of the Andes that was part of the country in question, but was sort of sheltered by the rainforest of the Amazon jungles from the populations of Brasil.

The people who monitor such things found out why that rich land wasn't being farmed, when an American oil company built a high quality graded road to the drilling area to bring supplies in and pump the oil out. Squatters from the more highly populated country of origin flooded this area from the Western side of the Andes to claim some of the land as their own. They just wouldn't take a chance without a good road in and out of that area across the Andes.

I think the world will run out of potable water long before they run out of land to grow food on. Fungi only grow mushrooms to spread their spores because they've eaten themselves out of house and home in the system they become parasites upon. Mushroom clouds associated with the advent of nuclear weapons might metaphorically serve as warnings that we've about eaten what we can from this particular planet. They're trying to find another planet for "life" to eat as fast as they can. It seems obvious to just about anybody that the jig is almost up, and Earth will join the list to follow Atlantis. ;-)

The Duke Of Mortality

Like anytime I have to go to the doctor its been a long day. I'm feeling pretty good right now, but tension has been in the air today. To get to Durham I had to take the I-40 and then the bypass around the capital city, Raleigh. I had forgotten about the traffic I'd encounter there on my way to keep my appointment. It didn't turn out to be a problem with me getting there on time. I left way early to allow myself time. It was the sheer madness of it all being there. All those cars. Bumper to bumper. Sheer insanity.

I'd never been to the Durham VA. It's right next door to the Duke University Hospital.The doctors I saw were all from the Duke Hospital. The rich people from all over the world come there to be treated, and they were treating me for nothing. I thought that was fair. Granted, you don't wanna have to get shot at and abused for that singular privilege. Get rich and hire them suckers instead.

I didn't really understand what I was doing there medically. The doctor told me. I was sent up there to confirm that I had RA. They did. The doctor couldn't bring my records up from the Fayetteville VA, because he was new and didn't know how. His boss, the head rheumatologist from Duke came in and showed him how to do it, and then tried to talk me into joining a experiment where they would pay me $100 to undergo this painful test to play guinea pig. I said no.

They put me on some cancer medicine even though I don't have cancer. It's supposed to crank up my immune system and get it to fight the inflammation. It's also supposed to be a heavy-duty anti-inflammatant itself. He said he's trying to help me rather than treat the symptoms. That made me feel good.

They gave me a little better grade pain-killer. It's still Tylenol 3. Believe it or not. in consideration of all the pain I'm enduring the best they've been able to offer is Tylenol 3? As far as I'm concerned I'm dying, and they act like I got the equivalent of a toothache. I'll make do. I got a few tricks of my own up my sleeve.

Any Ol' God In A Storm

It had become a ritual I looked forward to. I guess it may have started when I was working a lot of over time. I got home too late to see the six o'clock, and went to bed too early to see the late news. I caught up with the news on the Sunday morning pundit shows. I enjoy watching the banter and expose' attitude of the national reporters who were often at the event domineering the daily news. I like the fact that nearly all of them have bipartisan guests. I can tell when they're token... and "CLICK!"... I'm outta there.

To me it's a welcome change to the talking head anchor man dealio. The larger and more diverse the group of guest commentators there are in the program, the more apt I am to stay tuned. These things start on the over-the-air channels (which amount only to the older national networks and PBS) at nine o'clock and are gone by eleven. So am I. I hate it that the NBC News guy died that ran Meet The Press. He lived hard and died young. But, that's not why I hate it that he died.

I hate it because Tom Brokaw took over the spot. Whatta diva! He constantly attempts to keep the lime light on him rather than his guests (he's not an idiot, he just doesn't have that much original material, and what he has runs out about ten minutes into his shows), who always seem to have more interesting opinions than Brokaw does. They need another Tim Whathisname to anchor that show, and fast.

The Sunday morning news shows are not what they used to be, but I've become like an old gray mare myself, and my daily life ain't nothing to post on the internet, but I'm doing it anyway or I might not have much of a life at all. I write about what's going on with me, which ain't much, literally. How much could I write about cramming food in at one end, and excreting it out the other.

Speaking of excretions, my bathroom is upstairs and nobody can see my house from a public area, so where do you think I go to take a piss? Outside. Recently, I walked outside to the outer perimeters of my unmown lawn and turn it loose. I looked down on the grass of my lawn and saw something wiggling like it was trying to move out of the stream of my piss.

It might have been four inches long (10.16 cm) and at first I thought it might be a small snake. I kept pissing on it and it kept wiggling like it didn't appreciate my gift worth a crap, but eventually I ran outta piss and stopped torturing it.

My conclusion is that it was an ordinary earthworm that might have emerged from the ground to enjoy the warm summer-like weather in November. It couldn't have been a snake because it didn't have a distinct head. I may have the whole thing wrong, but I'm thinking what made me question whether it was really an earthworm instead of some sort of reptile was the ridge-like appearances of lines running from one end of it to the other.

These "lines" were not a different color. The only thing that seemed to define them or offer a descriptive was that the skin was puckered up along that line. I only observed maybe three of these ridged lines. I got the idea that they were visible simply because that worm had been out of the ground for a while, and it's skin took that shape when unprotected by being underground.

Okay, I captured that rather droll drifting thought, but it was laborious to finish, and I'm not convinced it was worth the struggle. Who cares about the shape of earth worms who have been outta the ground crawling around for a while?

The truth be that writing about the simple mundane chores of my ex-is-tense is the most difficult things to write about for me. I'm constantly fighting off the temptation to conclude suddenly that nobody has the slightest interest in reading these vulgar toilette affairs, and are sometime, if not often or frequently, displeased.

That seems a little not right for me to admit that. I have to pretend I'm writing TO somebody or I have nothing to say. A great majority of the ti-me the people I pretend I'm writing to are amalgamations of a cast of thousands and not about any one person, but occasionally I do write TO a specific individual, and I've never had one soul to act like it wasn't them when I do it.

Defining or describing what I experienced when I walked outside to take a piss is not just about what I do in the privacy of my own property. It's about possibles. I'm playing around with an idea I grokked from Sartre last year. I proposed that he claimed certain behaviors as a species flaw. To wit: That homo sapiens can't perceive their own possible directions in real time. They can't see what's possible for them directly. They gotta read the lay of the land and take chances they got it right.

Systems for thinking about things are in the business of conjuring possibles for homo sapiens who don't have a clue they can't do it for themselves. The only thing any of them systems got for sell is hope. If you can see what's possible it gives you hope. Maybe hope, faith, and charity too, but that's another dogma.

I've been writing a lot in the last year or so about how some people ply systems of expertise and try to pass them off for God-given gifts. Primarily the gift of knowing called gnosis. It's one of many given gifts that couldn't happen without divine intervention. It doesn't seem to matter which particular divinity you attribute your gift to, but any ol' god will do in a storm.

"Modesty is the art of power." ~Alexander Pope

The Alpian Way

Recently, when my brother and his wife and me traveled to Seattle, we took some time to tour America's Alps up near the Canadian border. I'd never heard of them and for sure I'd never passed through them in my travels. Not that I recall. I was on steroids for my RA during that trip, and to say I felt thrilled about seeing the countryside would be low-balling it. Wow! 

The three of us were riding through this Tyrollean-like wonderland completely agog by the spectacular views we were surrounded by. This place was definitely not the coastal plains of the Carolinas where we hailed from. It was about as opposite of where we lived regularly as it could get. The coastal plains of the Atlantic are as flat as a fly flitter, sometimes for a hundred miles (161 Km) inland.
 
My Aquarian youngest brother, always handy with the facts, informed me for some reason that there were only two deciduous trees in the species cypress belongs to. The bald cypress in the coastal plains back home, and the Western Larch. 

We stopped at a rest stop that was apparently inside a federal park. It was also a Ranger station. They had labeled plants with neat little government tags along walkways that ended up on platforms with spectacular views (I can't help it. Spectacular is all I got for this place). My brother and his wife took off on their own so nobody would know I was WITH them, and so I looked for a Western Larch.

Not there. I was very thorough in my search. We had been in the car together too long. I went inside and asked a Ranger who said he was a forestry specialist if they had Western Larches in the Park. He told me there were some there, but they were about forty miles away up a hiking trail.

He asked me why did I wanna know about Western Larches. I told him about the deciduous thing and that we had lots of bald cypress down by the river where I lived. He immediately perked up and asked me where I was from. I told him the coastal plains of North Carolina, and he started naming towns and counties. I realized then that he was a real tree enthusiast. 

The paragraphs above are leftovers from a post I wrote that got too long. What's below is another one. They don't have anything to do with one another.

I sorta hate to admit it because it appears to piss a few too many people off, but I'm not convinced Mother Nature is my intimate friend. On the contrary, tha' bitch has been trying to murder me my entire life... and she will ultimately succeed... whether I bow down and worship or not. Your milage may vary. 

The personality is a strange, humanly constructed aberration of nature that no other species than homo sapiens understand it's hopes and aspirations. When I write of a docetic spirit moving through my body unaware of my personality's petty desires, I mean to include Mother Nature too. 

I will be the idiot and take this further. I don't think any other aspect of nature is aware of any homo sapiens personality. This is a species specific phenomenon. But, I would say that wouldn't I. I'm thinking the expression "islands in a stream" might be apropos for the human condition. I suspect we're the only form of life on Earth that kens the persona ex-is-ts. 

Bald Cypress And The Western Larch

I'm attacking my problem with arthritis as if it were dietary. My friend Jerry sent me a link to an outfit that acts like diet is the problem. I heard this woman tell how her father started the system because he had migraine headaches. He tried the usual suspects, they didn't work, and so he stopped eating everything and when he went back to eating discovered that he could tell within twenty minutes whether the food he was experimenting with contributed to his headaches. So, that's what I'm doing.

Yesterday, the only thing I ate was some yogurt stuff called Activa. I love the way the specified bacteria helps me digest food, so I was a little surprised when only after a short amount of time I could tell it had a detrimental effect on me. Aha!

I've eaten some organic grapes and some probably unorganic greasy hash brown potatoes, and they went down okay. This morning i didn't have anything else in my refrigerator but dairy products and some small frozen chicken breasts. I fried the chicken and ate two of the breasts. They were tasty, and haven't caused me any problems. I cooked four of them and left two of them in the skillet. Then, I was chasing the first chicken down with some red burgundy, and decided to marinate the other two pieces of chicken with wine, I just turned them over after a half hour or so, and they looking good!

I'm sitting here in my house on November the 15th sweating like a pig, no, pigs don't sweat, I'm hot. Sweating. Had to get up and open the outside door to see if it will cool off in here. Tonight it's supposed to freeze. This is the warm air being pulled up out of the Gulf of Mexico in front of a huge cold front bubble coming from Canada. Oh, joy!

My Fate Found Me On The Road I Took To Avoid It

I've been using some herbal tea this morning to see if it helps with the arthritis. It did help some, but it made me nauseous and I puked my guts out. Maybe that's what it's supposed to do. A lot of these herbal concoctions make me puke.

More than one person has asked me what I meant by Thursday's entry. I'm guessing these people assumed I was rapping about suicide. That's not my point. I'm writing about a new page in the sense that I have to consciously use the database I was given exclusively. That's pretty scary.

I find it difficult to describe how this database reaches into other people's minds in ways they don't understand and I'm not all that aware of, because they're limited to the database they operate from during just one lifetime. The other creatures and entities they have made themselves into through evolution are right there in their aura. I'm describing things in their aura they don't consciously know about, but yet... they can't imagine how to pray for it to open to them, because they can't imagine infinity. It's a species flaw, and a no blame situation.

This woman used to stare off into the distance. She stared at people in public without an inkling, much less a care, about the etiquette of it. Sometime people took her interest in the wrong way. Others took it just right. I've watched babies stare at some activity that interested them like like woman stared at things. Openly, with no holds barred. Dispassionately taking it all in as if ethics and morals were something she'd deal with in some distant, undefined future.

She didn't talk. Not to me at least. I saw her recently at a social affair and she moved around and through the tables like a gadfly and constantly smoozed cutesy, clever nonsense to make people feel comfortable and at ease. She never did that sort of thing with me or even when she accompanied me with other people around. I was sort of astounded that she had seemed to suddenly blossom into some "hostess-with-the-mostest". Then I remembered how I had asked her opinion about something in her emotional past and she would clam up. I had to intuit the answer or play some form of Twenty Questions where she would nod if the answer was "Yes", and shake her head from side to side to indicate "No."

I was introduced to her for the specific purpose of reading her palm. It was pretended that I was there for supper, but she couldn't boil water, and so that was a well-intentioned dream. I successfully guessed right about some very powerful emotional events in her life. Sometime I think she figured I could read her thoughts she couldn't express her own self for either love nor money, and that by being with me, she wouldn't have to explain what she could not say if I already knew. I operated a system of expertise, and she thought I was a prophet.

The problem for me was that my intuition of her feelings didn't stop where she thought it should if I were a decent, honorable person. I couldn't not know her other personal business as well and it drove me to violence. That's why I don't like her as a human being. She drove me to violence by lusting for others with feelings I couldn't shut out, and then looked at me with that blank stare and lie about her feelings as if I weren't in the room.

Reading others is a two-edge sword. It's not a matter of choosing which thoughts to be-co-me with, and where to draw the line. The channel is open. There is no line drawn after the way opens. It was a two-way street. I too have sinned. Granted, she couldn't help having the feelings she had, but I couldn't help having the feelings she had in unison. I should have run for my life. I shoulda gone to the other side of the world and waited for her to find another fool. I didn't wanna be lonely again. My fate found me on the road I took to escape it.

A New Page

Something has happened that has expanded my awareness of what I'm here for. I have described how I've realized that my remembering vision is the same thing that's being called gnosis. I had a vision in which I "saw" myself arrive here on Earth and started imitating other entities who were already here. I arrived here, as I totally believe everyone did, with the power to create through mimicry. My remembering vision was literally and experientially grokking what happened in the billions of intervening years, centuries, millennia, etc..

In about 15 minutes human time I "saw"everything I had ever made myself into, from alpha to omega in full consciousness. Previous to this experience the only experiential database I had to make sense of the world was one of this single lifetime, and it was composed of the graven images accumulated since I acquired this body when it was around fourteen years old.

Now, I had this very inclusive database of billions of lifetimes in every form I made myself into through evolution. I also saw all the wars and weapons mankind created from rock and stones to nuclear weaponry.

It's taken nearly forty years for me to realize that I started using this extended experiential database instead of my old one almost exclusively rather immediately. It has caused me a world of trouble. Nobody likes a smartass. They're fascinated by the crap I come up with, but it intimidates them. No blame.

My awareness that I'm supposed to use this installed database exclusively to solve my little Earth problems has come into full awareness now. Anything else is blasphemy of the spirit. I don't know where this will lead to, but I'm not immortal, so eventually, it must end with physical death. What happens in the interim is a crap shoot.

Stealing Jack's Beanstalk

What a weird e-mail day. I'm writing stuff I don't even believe myself, except that I know it's the right thing to write in the moment. Even five minutes later the thrill is gone. I think I probably must have written as many e-mails today as the whole group combined. They'll never forgive me for that.. I glutted the market.

I've needed something to occupy my mind. It's just now dawning on me that I have an incurable disease that's gonna haunt me the rest of my life, barring some miracle, medical or otherwise. I had an old acquaintance visit me yesterday. A retired cop who imitated me hiking on the Appalachian Trail, but he attempts to make a through hike where I only walked a couple of hundred miles. He's failed to make it for the last couple of years because of injuries. Then, I heard he made it last year. All the way from Springer Mountain in Georgia through to Maine. That's a major life achievement that anybody would be proud off.

We talked out on the outside deck I use for a front porch. He had been hiking back on some of the family land down toward the river. We chatted about different topics, and then he told me what he had stopped by for. He told me I was only the third person he had told, that he hadn't actually finished the trail. He had more physical problems about three hundred miles from Maine, and had to come home. He's 66 years old. Ya gotta figure... you know? What 66 year old man wouldn't be proud he had hiked over two thousand miles (3219 Km) successfully. He already has plans for next summer. He's gonna make it this time...

I wanna pretend I don't know why he came and confessed that to me.

I disclaim knowing the truth. I don't know the truth from a hole in the ground. I make this stuff up to amuse myself. I try to capture drifting thoughts no matter their veracity. It's what I do to make time fly. I do the same thing on the discussion lists I subscribe to. It upsets people with institutionalized minds to no end. I'm innocent. I can't determine their reaction to what I write. The fools thinkc things have to be a certain way or the sky will fall in. When it doesn't, they usually fold. No blame.

Opposites Attract

Epiphanies don't excite me so much any more. I just won't let them. They're like a temptation to ecstasy that only turns to it's opposite eventually and I suffer the pangs of hell. It's what I discover through my writing that bakes the cake. It's what provides the heat when I'm cooking.

I just sent off an e-mail post in which I quote Goethe's poem:

The Holy Longing

Tell a wise person, or else keep silent
because the massman will mock it right way.
I praise what is truly alive,
what longs to be burned to death.

In the calm water of the live-nights,
where you were begotten, where you have begotten.
a strange feeling comes over you
when you see the silent candle burning.

Now you are no longer caught
in the obsession with the darkness
and a desire for higher lovemaking
sweeps you upward.

Distance does not make you falter.
now, arriving in magic, flying,
and finally, insane for the light,
you are the butterfly and you fare gone.

And so long as you haven't experienced
this, to die and so to grow.
you are only a troubled guest
on the dark earth.

Goethe

I copied and pasted this poem from the internet a long time ago to a folder I keep for poems I like and wrote in the past. There is a typo in the poem I keep. It's supposed to say "love-nights" instead of "live-nights". l sent off the copy without changing it this morning. Too late after I'd hit the Send button. I went straight to my poetry folder and edited the original so it won't happen again.

Goethe's poem amazes me. It's translated from German I assume, and when I first read it I understood everything from the first four lines. The translator must have been very sensitive and gifted themselves.

I think I must have wasted a lot of time trying to do the impossible. It's about the eternal argument between liberals and conservatives. Recently, I've begun to realize that I've never truly understood the opposition. By that I mean that I've never felt competent to write about the conservative point of view because I've just fought against it without reasoning it out.

I still don't write about them even though I think I'm beginning to understand why they take the attitude they do. I still think they're selfish idiots without an ounce of morality or ethics, but I guess it took the fear of God for me to gain enough wisdom to forgive them for what they can't help reacting to as real. '-)

Opposites argue. This is especially noticable on e-mail discussion groups, where literally opposite astrology signs get into these long, drawn out arguments about whose perspective is correct. I'm witnessing one such argument on the Thomas list between an Aquarius (liberal) and a Leo (conservative). One of my favorites in the past was between a Libran and a Pisces with a lotta Aries in her natal. I argue with Scorpios sometimes for years on end. Well, if it's a long-distance thing where they can't murder me right away.

These are weird arguments between opposite signs. They only know what their solar sign is that they read about in the paper. They don't know their opposite sign or that their argument is about two ends of the same spectrum. Most of the time they're not angry with each other, and actually do understand why the other thinks the way they do. Why would they not? Everybody plays Devil's Advocate as their opposite sign. How could they not? It's all they know.

Believe it or not it might appear that I've learned not to insert myself into these types of arguments. It's like trying to interfere in a domestic argument. Try to calm one side of the argument down and the other person will attack you screaming for you to mind your own business.

I can't help it. I'm gonna say something. I'm gonna make an innocent remark to intervene in the Aquarius/Leo "discussion" to see if they basically tell me to mind my own business. They both live a long, long way from here. I'd have days, at least, to git outta town before they come 'looking me with fire in they eyes.

A Wino's Hooch

Here is my hooch with those windows installed. They're on the left side of the house.

I don't feel much like writing today. I'm mostly creating something to put the photo above on my blog page to show it to Lee.

The photo shows a lovely phenomenon that happens at a certain time of the year where the Sun sets on th pond down beneath my house. The water the Sun reflects off of is about 20-30 feet lower than the area where the photograph was taken. When i first saw this happening I truly thought maybe the woods were on fire, but something was different and there wasn't any smoke. You can notice the blue sky above the trees.

Devoutly Doing What's Religious To You

The Thomas discussion group has this weird guy who shows up occasionally, as I'm prone to do, as I have done, who has taken to whining about the traffic or rather lack of traffic that happens in the group these days. He misses the old days (at least three years ago) when there were a lot of people participating, and it wasn't unusual to get a hundred e-mails a day or more from this lively group. Not so much any more. There are some days when there is not even one post from the group. It's been that way for a while.

Lots of people have speculated about why the participation is at such a low ebb, and I have too. I'm gone speculate some more right now. E-mail as a personal medium ain't what it used to be. Lots of people are using text messaging and other formats like Twitter to communicate these days. As far as the Thomas group is concerned, the topic itself ain't rocket science to figure out what it's about. People come and go there for their own interests to be satisfied, and when they are, they move on.

Some people try to make the Gnostic library into the excuse they need to tell the traditions that raised them that they're hypocrites. I might have started out studying Thomas for a similar reason myself, but I thought I might be able to use the Gnostic library writings, particularly The Gospel Of Thomas as a way of mediation with the crowd I live amongst here in the Bible Belt. It hasn't really worked the way I wanted it to, but studying the sayings and participating in the discussions have had a powerful effect on my religious views.

To wit: My religious views are not all that much about religion. Not religion as viewed here in the Bible Belt, but finding out what "religion" means to me lets me live here in relative peace. The coastal plains are a great place to live, and enough so that I'm willing to make a few concessions if I must appear to.

The attitude that I have decided to take about religion and hypocrisy is that a person's TRUE religion is what they approach religiously, and act like attending to whatever that is makes them religiously devout. That obsession, whatever it is, is what God means to them. They may not know what that is, but there is one thing I'm experientially certain of, and that's that they're never hypocritical about what they actually treat religiously. Their church affiliation may be up for grabs in a moment of temptation, but they're never untrue to what they truly worship

My friend Rainey has seem to got religion about playing the mandolin. You wouldn't believe what this religion is causing him to do. I get the impression without knowing the truth of it, that he might spend more money than he can actually afford to go to the various musical venues to find people to play with and be mentored about what's going on with the mandolin. The final straw is that he has been letting his hair grow longer. He's done for now.

You might not realize how obsessed Rainey has become with the mandolin unless you've heard him play the guitar. Rainey's a fine guitar player with a taste for jazz. Even more puzzling is that it's been only recently that he finally bought himself a top shelf guitar to play what he so melodiously does. Now, he's playing a ratty-ass borrowed mandolin like it's the cat's meow. Religious fanatics are just technically insane. :-)

Reeling For Recognition

You know how I like to insert hyphenation marks in words, so you'll understand my dilemma when I broke up the term "recognize". Re-cog-nize. This morning I decided to zero in on the "cog" part and typed that into Google, which led me to Wikipedia at the link below:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cog

Wikipedia announces several times that clicking on that link will bring you to a "Disambiguation page". It list the many possible ways the term "cog" might come into play. I guess the way I use it most of the time is in it's role as "a gear". A little cog on a big wheel. It rotates faster the closer the cog gear is to the hub. If the pioneers would have just known about electrical generators, they could have geared one up to those big wooden wheels on the Conestogas and stored all the electricity they would have needed to keep a light burning all night long. The Indians, of course, would have been flabbergasted and dismissed them as nuts.

I'm wondering if the intention of the coiner of the term "recognize" was referencing gears? Mankind has known about cog wheels for a long time. I wonder which came first. The cog wheels or the idea of what they ground out as potential. I'm thinking now of the act of recognizing something as an event in which gears are re-engaged. Like when something you witness reminds you of something, and that something it stimulates is some kind of mental wheel turner. It reconstitutes the necessary ingredients from the cosmic soup and gives them temporary individuation, but only as dependencies.

"-nizing" has gotta be about negation, not Miss Manners. Maybe it's about dissolution. Potential that dissolves when it's not constantly directed. Mind-ed. Tend-ed. Dissembled. Reformulated from a dissembled non-state of non-being. Binary disambiguation? Ideas from the Id. Ideation. All things possible without restraint. Without interference from the Ego. Without the imposed moral and ethical control of the Superego. Raw possibles on the half-shell... My Fair Lady.

Self-forming. Self-articulating elements without a cause moving in haphazardous patterns that have no one ho-me or purpose. They are legendary for gathering around the fire and re-cog-nizing.

Old In Days

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4 Jesus said, "The person old in days won't hesitate to ask a little child seven days old about the place of life, and that person will live.

For many of the first will be last, and will become a single one."

http://users.misericordia.edu//davies/thomas/Trans.htm

"I think of the old man approaching the child in the way of entering his second childhood and finding it familiar territory. Remembering that it had to make up it's own mind to do what it needed to do to roll over, crawl, and walk by itself, except the old man is confronted with letting go of this desire to imitate."

I wrote the above paragraph in an e-mail response. It was the expression "desire to imitate" that caught my attention and made me want to copy and paste it to for further comment. I don't have a clue what this commentary will concern. Probably to write about one of my favorite subjects. Imitation. Mimicry.

I learned everything via mimicry. I set people I admired up as a model to be imitated. I learned what I thought they knew that distinguished them from others in a positive way I admired. I adopted or created rules of conscience to guide me toward acting like I thought these people acted in order to obtain what i thought they had that would make me happy.

It took an inordinate amount of time for me to understand that being happy was not the end all and be all of my ex-is-tense. It took forever for me to learn to appreciate unhappiness just as much. I didn't create me a human body to come here and learn to be happy all the ti-me. I'm happy. I'm sad. Each in their own time. It doesn't make any difference which. I can change my own moods at will. Much less the world. I didn't come here to be moody. I just am at times. So what?

So, what's this business about getting old and reversing the process of imitating? If I come into being while passing away then this behavior (or rather the lack of it) might seem the least useful non-thing nobody would not do. I'm gonna go respond to Isabella's post and see if anything happens

Nope. Tried that and nothing much came out of it. I ended up writing about being put into a nursing home and serving as a sex object and a punching bag for disgruntled perverts.

Maybe the desire to imitate the other stops of it's own accord eventually. Imitation was very significant in my remembering vision. It was the first thing I did after I realized I couldn't go back out into space and continue to zip around the universe in total ecstagony. I don't know if I can stop imitation altogether because I brought the trait with me to Earth.

Maybe I'm just tired to death of attempting to use imitation to become more of myself as a human being. What I've stopped is to have quit imitating homo sapiens. I can't see where even the most enviable human being who has ever lived really got off on being what they were enough to where I would dedicate my life to be-co-me-ing what I dreamed up they were.

Multiple Religions

I wrote yesterday about "the Fox News gang". Today this woman who sits with them and has been friendly with me a few years, stopped by my booth to tell me a black joke about Obama. I was truly disappointed to see her stoop to that. I think she really likes me. She has flirted with me for a long time. That won't be so welcomed from now on, and there is probably not a time in my life that I need that flirting more.

I did receive an appointment letter from the arthritis clinic at the VA Hospital in Durham. This has been important to me to get that letter. That means my appointment is recognized as official, and I'm really needy to find out if there is something they can do to assist me with the pain I'm experiencing that won't have too horrible a side effect.

In a lot of ways I'm pretty much out of control of my physical person now. I receive information from the other and provide information to the other through a screen of self concern. Maybe it's the same old selfishness I've employed for as long as I can remember. I don't think it is deliberate, but just the natural way I am as a man.

I can't begin to tell you how helpless it makes me feel not to have full use of my hands. I have to make sure I don't bang them into the objects around me because I immediately withdraw into the reaction of my body hurting. If I am around other people i forget they exist until I can manage my reaction.

The fact that I'm still able to type is fairly astonishing. This stuff moves. It doesn't always hurt in the same place daily, and sometime it changes in the immediacy of now. It's difficult to make plans to do something in particular because I never know when the body parts I need to accomplish something I've planned will interrupt the process. It doesn't hurt as much to type today as it has for the last week or so, but I'm not getting my hopes up that it will be this way tomorrow.

I'm still strongly influence by the Jung quote about religion being one's defense against the experience of God. it's the idea of performing some act religiously that attracts my attention. I do things as if with religious intent sometime. Like learning to weld metal in my mid-thirties.

I was married to a beautiful woman with whom I had a child. I didn't have many skills to offer anybody who might offer me a job so I could pay the bills my family incurred. I'm not a hustler. It just don't come to me easy to figure out how to get money from other people. I had lived as a beggar, not a bread winner.

The unemployment office offered me a chance to go to a government-sponsored welding class. I went because it was the only way I could get some money. I didn't realize it was an opportunity at first, but I started hearing rumors that welders made at least twice the minimal wage per hour, and minimum wage or close was all I had been offered to work for years.

I began to work at learning to weld so I could support my family religiously. I'm not going to describe the process, but I spent a lot of extra hours after work learning to weld better in order to get the top journeyman's pay as soon as possible. I'm pretty sure my ex-wife thought i was seeing another woman at the time. It took about a year and a half, when the normal time was seven years. Welding became a religion to me. I've had other religions.

The Soul Of Wit

Today sort of feels like January 2nd. The big election day is over and we're back to the soap operas that really advertise soap instead of political smut on television. True to my word I didn't turn the TV on to hear the wrap up of the election results until the six o'clock news. What I did was to go by my youngest brother's business to talk with him about what happened. I really stopped there to pass the time until the usual crowd I call the Fox News Gang to show up at the cafe so I could gloat at their disappointment. It turned out that my brother wanted to go to the cafe too. We didn't say much. The smirks on our faces said enough.

It's not like my waiting until six o'clock to turn on the TV is unusual. It's a habit I've developed. It most likely that I'll watch PBS for the national news. I only receive over-the-air television. Too much spam on the usual network stations, and I don't receive any of the cable or disc shows. Sometime PBS gets boring when they draw out the details of topics I could care less about, so I'm usually doing something else at the same time. After the news I watch Jeopardy and Wheel of Fortune. If an interesting documentary is showing on PBS I'll watch that or turn the TV off.

That leaves a lot of time to fill during the day. My hands won't let me write as much. Writing makes time fly for me. It does it much better than playing card games and Sudoku on my computer. I can't really practice the scales on my piano anymore than I can use my computer keyboard and for the same reason. It's like I have a choice to either write or play my piano, and writing is more important to me. I have to rest my hands after about each sentence. I lay them in my lap and stare at what I've just written for a while. Writing makes my forearms ache, and oddly enow, the joints in both thumbs.

It's quiet enough now that I can hear the church bells and chimes playing in town a few miles away. A stiff breezes comes and goes, and it's whistling through the trees outside drowns out the sounds of the bells for a bit. It's like a sine wave. I hear the bells and then the wind and then the bells. I might as well be down at the ocean listening to the waves hit the shore. First this, then that, I know ten ways to skin a cat.

I've started meditating again. I'm doing oral enchantments of dubious origin. I practice the old exercises I learned in my various voice lessons and classes. When I first found out about it I was taken by surprise. Only the vowels are sung. Humans can't "sing" consonants. Consonants are what we use to chop up the sung vowels in either speech or song. "D, a deer, a female deer" is just a jingle designed to intone all the vowels a certain specified way.

Since I'm alone 95% of the time, I hardly ever talk anymore, and I used to make a living at it. If I didn't sing or chant mantras my vocal cords would shrivel and die. I can tell a huge difference in the way people react and respond to me if I've performed some vocal exercises before I go out into the public arena and talk to people. My voice reverberates with much more openness and control. It causes people to listen more closely than if I haven't talked for a couple of days and then go out.

The facticity of my practicing singing the vowel exercises cause my voice to pronounce each vowel with equal weight with the other vowels, and that's not done colloquially. People "hear" that whether they're paying attention or not. It's the fact that somebody in the cafe is doing that which enchants them. It doesn't have to make any sense to them. It's just that something different than usual is going on, and makes them harken to the sound of my voice all mute. Well, an a good day anyway. A man's gotta do....

A Sacred Fire

I wrote the paragraph below as a sort of odd appeasement. Well, that and to see what sort of feedback it might draw. Nothing so far, but I'm expecting something down the line, even if indirectly:

Everyman knows ya treat a lady like a whore and
she'll become mean and cantankerous like a man.
Mission accomplished. Why reinvent the wheel?
Contrarily, treat a whore like a lady and she doesn't
become a male, she becomes a banshee who
haunts the moors on cold, misty nights riding the
backs of the hounds of hell.

I composed this paragraph to follow quoting this saying from the Gospel of Thomas in which Peter tells Jesus he oughta get shed of Mary Magdalene.

114 Simon Peter said to them, "Make Mary leave us, for females don't deserve life." Jesus said, "Look, I will guide her to make her male, so that she too may become a living spirit resembling you males. For every female who makes herself male will enter the kingdom of Heaven."

http://users.misericordia.edu//davies/thomas/Trans.htm

If you'll notice the introduction of this saying at the web site you'll see that it was added on to the original list of 114 Sayings. The Catholics did this a lot, but they sure as heck didn't originate the practice. Like most other religious dogma, they tried to make the old ways look like their idea, or at least alter it to make it appear as if it did. The Egyptians and the Pharaohs were notorious for this type of desecration. Chipping noses and other protruding body parts off the old statues. It's what goes on, after the thrill is gone.

The point about women becoming like males in the Wilhelm/Baynes translation of the I Ching has a decisive opinion that disagrees with this saying. In this ancient writing, women becoming equal to men would indicate the end times. The males of a lotta different species do their best creative work trying to impress the females. If there was no need for that, all creativity would come to a standstill.

Other than the fact that I can be and often am a total asshole, I think the dissolution of my marriages, especially the second, was in large part, a result of the women's liberation movement that was rampant at the time.

I'm waiting to turn the TV on until the six o'clock news again today. Too much redundant information drives me nuts. I think the results of this election are going to change the world temporarily in a good way. I'm very pleased with the results. I just hope the promise pays off like it's indicated. I don't like the Red and Blue partisanship. It'll take a firebrand, and I think... I believe... we got One.

It's About Ti-me

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Sanity has returned to the United States of America.

A Real Nice Pot Of Chili

I've had some insight about how my remembering vision happened. It's been an insight that has congealed slowly, as opposed to an epiphany of instant enlightenment. This insight is based on smallness. The microcosm if you like. Nanotechnology. I stated in an e-mail response earlier this morning that all the living entities I've made myself into since the bejinning of ti-me is compiled into a database of life experiences that reside in our aura, and it's our aura that seems immortal more than anything else I'm aware of. Even thee planet earth has an aura, several in fact, in which the history of it's place in the universe is contained. But, life is that aura that surrounds the earth, and just like our subjective experiences of what's happened to us since we arrived is contain in our personal aura, the history of the Earth is contained in it's atmospheric aura.

The trick in grokking this is how consciousness works. There is quite a difference between living forms being conscious, and possessing consciousness. To know that we know. Knowing that we know is what makes us human, but it's very possible that this ability of being conscious and being conscious that we are conscious matriculates to a higher order of understanding. Reflection. It's the second facticity of being conscious that we're conscious that produces consciousness.

I''m making this crap up as I go along. I disclaim knowing the truth about anything. I write this stuff as speculation and amusement. Your milage may vary.

With the question being: If I"ve been here billions of years evolving eventually into be-co-me-ing a homo sapien that possesses consciousness, How can one recognize and organize the meaning of all the previous lifetimes in which consciousness did not ex-is-t?

Another way of approaching this is to consider that you arrived here billions of years ago, and yet only the last relatively few million years produced consciousness. Being conscious that we're conscious beings. Briefly, no consciousness, no memory of what one has been before, I'm suggesting it might be easy to remember what had been witnessed with the faculty of consciousness, but despite that, possibly not remembering all those previous billions of lifetimes and experiences previous to our matriculation into full-blown consciousness. Remembering and experiencing the states of being we have experienced both merely being conscious AND possessing consciousness is a gift.

I used my slow cooker to make some more chili last night. I ate just a taste of it to discover if it lived up to my usual standards. When i went upstairs to go to bed I could smell it cooking, and came back downstairs to cut it off. Leaving it cooking all night while I sleep has proved to be a little over the top. I cut the cooker back on a little while ago to hot it back up. When it simmers for a while I'll fix me a medium bowl of it, and let it cook a while before I turn it off again. it oughta last me about three days. Chili is about the only thing I gnow how to cook, but it's good, real good.

Like Clarified Yak Butter

I was browsing through the usual news sites and ran across this link to Linus Torvald's blog. He's the creator of the Linux Operating System, and sometime these geniuses have something useful to say. I liked the way these two paragraphs are formed:

"The reason has always been that I don't like single-issue people,
nor do I think that people who turn the world into black and
white are very nice or ultimately very useful. The fact is, there
aren't just two sides to any issue, there's almost always a range
or responses, and "it depends" is almost always the right answer
in any big question. And not being even willing to see the other
side makes for bad decisions.

Don't get me wrong - I love seeing people who are really
passionate about what they do, and many people have something
they really care about. It's just that when that becomes something exclusionary, it often gets ugly. It's not passion for something,
it becomes passion against something else."

http://torvalds-family.blogspot.com/2008/11/black-and-white.html

It's the way Linus Torvald uses the "for" word that caught my attention, but more so because he included the age old polarity of "against" to match and balance the "for". As the mountain folk are reputed to say, "Boys, yer either fer sumthin or agin it. Take yo' choice, and then be willing to die fer it." The author doesn't mention dying "agin" something, just dying "fer" it.

I haven't paid that much attention to the "for" part of that polarity until I started reading Sartre a year or so ago. It's impossible for me to ignore it now. It's easier to spot it in writing than to pick it up in situ with all the other stuff going on.

The way Torvald put it with "for" and "against" set up as a reaction to passion, I suspect this attitude of "it depends" could work pretty much across the board when you're dealing with emotional issues.

The dark scenario I'm envisioning involves fictitious visits in the early morning hours by government types. Even in that sort of situation humans still hear people say what they might have said, and humans still see what they subjectively figure is out there, so if one's response to a life or death question by those dispassionate visitors gives you more ti-me to figure out their true motive, then any plausible moment of uncertainty could be a blessing rather than a curse.

There are a lotta younger men who are older than me, and there are a lotta older men who are younger than me, but whether older or younger it's still possible for a startling epiphany to appear, in which it can be realized without forgetting, that there is only so much time for any of us to "tell it all, brothers and sisters, before the Fall."

Luminescence

There seems to be something in the air today. Maybe it's because it's the day before the big election. This is a bigger deal than the Super Bowl by far. There are people on both sides of the aisle who have proclaimed they will commit suicide if their side don't win. I wonder what the body count will be? Voting early was a strange experience. Seems sort of anticlimactic because I did. If I should live so long I won't do it again. It doesn't matter to me who wins personally, I'm an old man, but for my children's sake I hope the Republicans lose. I assume that for those who do vote to return the war-mongerers to power hate their own children and want them to suffer a horrible death. Even I'm not that kinky.

My friend Rainey has a web site where he posts the pictures he takes. Mostly of the local flora and fauna, but he also goes to and takes pictures at various musical festivals and fairs. He likes a variety of music and people. Take a look:

http://raineyp.blogspot.com

I'd like to think of something else to write about except my health problems. It's just that I don't really have anything else on my mind. I've been cursing the government for not prescribing me some pain medicine that would actually attack the problem, but the best they've done so far is tell me to take ibuprofen three times and day and call them in a year or so. I got better pain-killers from my dentist for a toothache. Mind you, toothaches are very painful, and they deserve good drugs.

I'm starting to get a little depressed over the prospects for the future. I walk around with my shoes untied because it hurts too bad to tie them. I don't take showers until the stench gets so bad that I can't even stand to smell myself. Putting on and taking off my clothes can be a real hassle. I took a long, hot shower yesterday, and it made me so weak I could barely stand. That has more to do with this horrible cold I got.

My youngest brother came over to co-sympathize with me. He's got this cold too. He told me there are two strains of colds going around. The one we both have involves a lot of congestion. I took a walk down into the woods behind his house. I didn't get too far. The cold wore me out pretty fast. On the way back I saw him in the yard. He spoke. Normally, I would approach him and we'd chat a while. Yesterday I just waved, grunted some sort of greeting, and came on back to collapse at home. I apologized for being dismissive earlier, but he told me he understood. Just after that he said he went into his own house and took a three hour nap. It' really hard for the sick to cheer up the sick, but we both tried.

I got two brothers. Both of them are younger than me. I have completely different relationships with them. My youngest brother gets along with everybody it seems, for the most part, but my younger brother and I have been at each other's throats since childhood. Even when I try to be at least polite and friendly, he makes me regret is. He don't come near me, for his part, and apparently forbids his children to have anything to do with me. I feel like I'm an innocent victim, but I too have sinned.

Our relationship is almost like a plot in a story and we are somehow forced by circumstance to act the way we do toward each other. My youngest brother is no pushover by any means, but he makes an effort to meet me half-way as far as the family thing is concerned. That's what I don't understand. About all anybody has to do to get along with me is to be friendly, and I'll be friendly back. In other words, don't start no shit, and there won't be no shit. Unless I'm forcing you out of my life for a while for spiritual reasons, I'm so easy it's pathetic. I'm the pushover. Maybe that's what my younger brother is ashamed of.

If you think the typos and editing omissions that appear here are bad, you oughta see what sort of corrections I've already made. I pass over things without the slightest awareness, and then when I go back to edit what I've written, I'll leave double words and completely omit connecting words. That's probably the main reason I don't read what I've written from the archives. It's just too embarrassing.

I'm almost afraid to grok the true reasons for my having to insert foam earplugs into my ears to get any peace around here. I'm legally deaf, but the sounds of machinery, particularly diesel engines drives me nuts. I blame it all on the Neurophone I bought and used, that is, until using it gave me a touch of skin cancer on my left temple, and I had to quit. Instead of using regular headphones, I plugged the output cable from the stereo unit into the black box that contained the neurophonic circuitry, and used these ceramic contacts (covered with brass platelets) to hear the music through those ceramic contacts pasted to the skin at two points of my facial skin. I conditioned myself to hear through my skin. It's a matter of training the brain to recognize audio signals from a different source than the eighth cranial nerve. The technique is supposedly used with the optic nerve also.

When I put people into a state of hypnosis and they attain simultaneity with that null point where we exist in mutual reception, I've tried for a long time to see if they can give they own selves suggestions. They don't realize in real time they have self-initiating volition in that state of being, and when and if they realize they do, they're no long at that null point where the work can begin.

That's why self-hypnosis isn't much more affective than reciting quaint affirmations. I've always desired mightily to describe this state of being, because if I could, adequately, then you would recognize it in your own life because we're all in and outta there numerous times each waking hour. It I could adequately describe it we could talk about it like the weather. It's like trying to describe the wind. One can describe what it does by the effects that can be witnessed, but the wind itself is invisible.

It's the center point of omnidirectionality. If you wanna think about being everywhere all at once and at the sa-me ti-me, then where you'd think about that FROM is where the search for me-and-thee-ing (meaning) would necessarily bejin.

This is the direction I was going before I realized that what I've been calling the "pearl" because of what it looked like to me, probably operated more or less like what I've become familiar with about Black Holes. Black holes as a theory. That's why I capitalized. To refer to the ideation we possess of what might be real. I'm thinking that pearl-like entity I've written about that radiated some strange light out from itself to a specified distance, and because the endpoint of each radiate "arrow" stopped at the same distance from it's empty center, that shaped radiance made it look like an oyster pearl.

Luminescence. The radiance glows from within itself. It moves according to whether it's moving or at rest. I'm reframing this somewhat to match what I read about Stephen Hawking and his partner in crime Roger Penrose figured out this radiation mathematically:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stephen_Hawking

I just ran across this Wikipedia article a couple of weeks ago and read about how they had proved this radiation ought to exist around a black hole. I realized immediately that could also describe what I "saw" as a pearl. It was me. The creator of my own illusions. I am is all there is to it.

That's when I began to wonder if this "pearl" I envisioned myself as, was really a teeny-tiny version of a very real black hole. That, this "black hole" I've been describing as having a pearl-like appearance IS (upon closer inspection by reflection) is the core of being for all forms of life we ask about playing Twenty Questions, Black holes gather stuff around them. Like galaxies, for instance. Why not gather together stuff to integrate some life form on earth? Like a mosquito or an elephant or some incredibly small microorganism? True, it would have to be an incredibly small black hole. But, when you're talking about BLACK HOLES, does size really make a difference?

The reason this seems to fit is that the pearl fits the same description as a black hole. The only real difference in what I experienced in vision and what's been described by Hawking is that his black hole only goes one-way and mine is omnidirectional. Mine works like the cornucopia. At rest it's like a closed drawstring poke bag. No thing goes in, no thing comes out. When active, however, the drawstring is loose like the reins on a horse's neck, and all things possible go in and out as they will.

I don't really know if the Hawking' model is one-way. That things only go into his black hole via the event horizon and get squashed into oblivion. He may have provided for that. I think that's the point of gnosis, that I don't have to turn to Hawking' theories for further study. I see the real thang in my weird-ass visions. Why don't you get some visions? Then, you can become hated too. Nobody likes a smart ass.