Keeping Up While Staying Home

I've watched at least four TEDtalk videos today. The web site on the Talks have links to several categories of talks. I like choosing from the videos grouped under most popular. Interestingly enough, my favorite videos were among the site favorites.

Before I started listening to the TEDtalk series I listened to a lotta Google videos on consciousness. Now most of those are on youtube, but there are a lot of free lectures and even college courses free over the internet. I like the idea of it, but lectures and powerpoint talks get to be all the same after a while.

I think the reason I am enjoying these TEDtalks are because the presenters are there to talk about what they're fired up about, but they are also very entertaining. For all practical purposes they are sometimes as funny as professional standup comedians, and why would they not be?

Early in life, however, the Baptist preachers who used to come around the circuit to preach at our local church. There was a distinct difference between the traveling preachers and the ministers. The evangelists were there to get people all riled up with hell's fire and brimstone. They weren't gonna be around to take the flak next week when the energy they stirred up dissipated in their absence. The ministers were.

I watched a video this afternoon that feature Malcolm Gladwell who authored the book I've been writing about since last fall called Blink. His talk was about spaghetti sauce and the research guy who invented "chunky" spaghetti sauce. Malcolm is not only a good writer, but he's a good orator too. A fine storyteller. Instead of telling the Jesus stories and passing the plate, he wrote his own stories and passed the plate. Got rich doing it. Thinks it was the cat's meow. No blame.

The only classes I liked in college were the ones that had good orators for teachers. Maybe one of the reasons I never got a degree was that I refused to take courses that had boring teachers. Sometime it took half a semester for me to figure that out. Hardly ever did I go through a formal process of dropping their classes, I just stopped going. I got a lotta "F's" that way.

On the other hand, I took as many courses as I could in Geography without changing majors because I liked the geography school's department head's lectures. He was very charismatic, and I learned an awful lot of geography without trying.

I knew from watching my parents that neither of them taught the topics they claimed expertise in. They both taught life and what they thought you oughta know about it to get ahead. I don't think I had much choice about looking for that sort of teacher wherever I went to school. Between five years worth of GI Bill money and two different full four year scholarships I took what I wanted and threw the rest away.

I'm paying for my selfishness, but it's been a good run. Rather than having learned to earn to consume I've learned to do without. I'm a natural miser. It was easy once I realized that nobody had a clue about why they did what they did. They just ate what they could keep down.

Just Who Do You Think You Are?

Abandoning who-you-think-you-are gets easier the more often you do it. It's the same thing that's expected from the dead person when the Tibetan lama reads to it from the Tibetan Book of the Dead.

The problem in both cases is that the dead person or idea of yourself doesn't know it's dead. It's a big deal in the now defunct Tibetan culture because they claim the spirit of the dead person will be approached by a series of globe-like lights by which the spirit is supposed to let itself be absorbed into the light, but any resistance will stop it from happening. The biggest problem is that the spirit of the dead person can't accept that they're dead, and pay attention to what's being offered on a one-time-only basis.

I'm saying there is who-you-think-you-are, and neither were or will be. If the dead person's spirit refuses to accept that it's past life no longer ex-is-ts, but now, only is, and no more, chamber doors not withstanding...

That's why some pundits preach against the sin of needing to feel like an important person. Writers like Carlos Castenada claim that desire is the biggest impediment to spiritual understanding there is. Spending any time at all attempting to convince the other the world owes you a living is time you could have spent waiting for the colors to be-co-me with in order to matriculate to the next quest. "Abandon hope all ye who enter here."

It's the same way I interpret The Fool card in the Tarot deck. It's the zero card. It's neither high or low. But, if those in the high arcane to pass to the low arcane, and those in the low arcane wanna pass to the high arcane, both parties have to find a way to change who-they-think-they-are into who-they-thought-they-were.

They have to abandon completely their old way of doing or it gets in the way of where they're trying to go. They have to let the dead past bury it's own dead in order to attend to the light at the end of the tunnel, and in as fully conscious a mode as possible. It's only when the living spirit of the dead man realizes that what he was is now a mere carcass, that it can let go of what it was and let itself be absorbed unknowingly into what it can be. Maybe it's not just a species flaw. That the part that has to be overcome. The spirit not only has to let it's dead past bury it's own dead, but it's got to let itself be absorbed into a future of which it knows not.

It's pretty much the same story with the Grail quest. Percival, the country bumpkin tried to obey the laws of a gallantry instead of simply asking the Fisher King where it hurt when he was carried before him on a litter.

It's my ill-considered opinion that these myths and fairy tales depict the same story as that of the first Saturn Return in the system of astrology. The Saturn Return happens when the planet Saturn completes it's first orbit around the Sun 29 1/2 years after the native draws they first breath. It's reputedly when men let go of the personality they were raised to have and take on their own individuality.

The first part of life is a process of individuation culminating in the Saturn Return. It was written that the age of thirty is when the boyhood life of Jesus got in his way, and he offered it up for crucifixion as baggage to be abandoned. He had to become something else, and being his Father's son could be a real drag. So, he did the suicide-by-cop routine to put it all behind him, then retired with Mary Magdalene in the south of France the wine industry was well established, and he wasn't obligated to turn water into wine except on special occasions.

It's how the native reacts to the transformation wrought by their Saturn Return that determines how the rest of their life will go subjectively. That's because it's at this juncture that one realizes their fate is in their own hands, and that facticity can be a curse as well as a blessing.

I just got through watching this TEDtalk video by this woman percussionist on how to listen:

http://www.ted.com/talks/evelyn_glennie_shows_how_to_listen.html

She is a great communicator and she knows her subject. I was astounded by her skills with her hands and how she plays the drum and the vibraphone. She uses them throughout her talk, but at the end of her talk she plays the vibraphone, and it truly astounded me. I wanted to grab somebody by the elbow and direct them to look at what this woman was doing. I wanted to scream at my children, "Look! Look at what's she's doing. That's what God is like!"

Maybe I Left Something Out

I wrote something for yesterday, but it was so boring (even to me) that I couldn't even edit it and give it any worth.

There was possibly another activity going on besides me standing before the Moody Blues poster reading the lyrics of some of their songs. I was standing in front of the Moody Blues poster because I was at a house I'd never been inside of before. I was at this house in order to smoke a joint with the people who lived there, and the woman who lived in the same house I did. This happened forty years ago, but not necessarily forty years ago today.

I had some sort of relationship with this woman and she with me that neither of us appeared to understand. We slept in the same room most of the time, and made love with other people at the same time in that room, but although we got nakid together and tried to have physical sex together, it never worked out. We didn't excite each other in that way.

Since we didn't have a physical relationship and we made love with other people without any apparent problems there was no real reason for us to be jealous of one another, but we kind of were jealous, but maybe that's not the best term to describe what happened between us. It didn't last forever. Later, she became rather contemptuous of me and soon enow she appeared to deliberately avoid my presence.

I can't really know what my bottom-line motives for insisting on going over to those college boy's shared house to get high or in order somehow to protect Marion. By that I mean to say that I knew that my going over there to their house for any reason meant that if anything happened to Marion, I'd know where she was that night. She was notorious for having sex with several or more men one after the other.

She took the "free love" aspect of being a hippie very seriously. I never entertained the thought she was doing it for money. Most of the college kids she was boffing didn't have any money to pay her. Contrarily, she was doing what prostitutes do, and it wasn't a secret. She seemed sort of like the women that Jack The Ripper types would murder for the good of the world. A high number of serial murderers appear to choose mostly prostitutes and so-called "loose women" for their victims.

That might have been in the back of my mind as the real reason I sort of forced the guys into inviting me to go with them when they came by to pick up Marion, by insisting that they get me high or I'd put the kibosh on their romantic plans.

Anyway, when we did get to the house where they lived, and we all went inside, and they hurriedly brought out their stash and started passing joints, I knew it was to get me out of their way as soon as possible. I toked enough off of the several joints that were being passed simultaneously to get what I was gonna get from whatever we were smoking, and to indicate that and to move toward the door to leave, I segued into the dining room behind the living room where everybody was sitting.

The dining room was not completely walled off from the living room. The two rooms were adjoined by a Spanish arch in such a way that the rooms were open one to the other. The poster was in a small alcove in the wall and lit by a black light so that the lyrics really stood out. I may have only pretended to read them while I listened for what was going on in the other room.

This is how my attention may have gotten split in the first place. I certainly didn't plan to have a life-changing vision in that instant. As far as I was concerned I was only in that room as a station I attended to use as an excuse to move directly from standing in front of the poster to the front door, and could say I was leaving on my actual way out, and be gone before they could even say "Good night."

That did eventually happen. When the vision was over I had forgotten why I was there, much less concerned about getting high or protecting Marion for any reason at all. I was desperate to find a writing implement and something to write down what happened on. They ignored me, naturally, the party had begun and not everybody was fully clothed. I don't think they even noticed I'd gone. No blame.

From The Overflow Of The Heart

To explore a phrase in the last Gospel of Thomas saying Isabella sent out, I booted up Google and typed "the overflow of the heart" into the dialog box and clicked on Search. I found out its a phrase that's used in the KJV translation of the Bible, and so there were lots of comments from all sorts of Christians of whatever hue and variety about this phrase.

The way the phrase is used in the Thomas saying was a bit confusing to me, but after I started reading what the writers on all the web sites I went to from the Google Results Page I began to understand that the phrase is a clue to a behavior that can be applied to the me-and-ing (meaning) of either bad or good. In other word, it's from the tone of the words that comes from one's heart that you can tell whether the speaker means evil or good to you. It's a defense strategy.

That may not mean so much to people who people who don't "read" other people's behavior in order to operate a mojo. A mojo like hypnosis. When I do hypnosis with people it happens like we're just continuing a conversation we've been having all along. We discuss the fact that we're gonna do hypnosis together because usually I'm the one who knows what hypnosis is and will be making the suggestions that is designed to get the desired response.

The thing about being the hypnotist is that you can't know what's going on inside the psyche of the person in the subjective trance except from what you can see from the outside. That's what makes a good hypnotist. A person who can watch the subjects body and figure out from just those external clues what to suggest to the person in trance next.

That's why my style of hypnosis seems to work so well for me and the other person. We both know what we want to accomplish, and we can talk about how well or not what we're doing together is getting the results we've agreed upon. We talk. If I can interpret the effect what we're doing has on their heart by the way they speak, that's a whole dimension more of feedback I can use to counter their resistance to going to places inside themselves they've never been before.

It was the same process when i used to read palms. I had to be able to fathom the depth of the emotional content of the subject's heart to be able to reach for conclusions about what to say to them. To serve me in this end I have neither more or less tools I have to understand what's going on inside a hypnotized person.

There's lots of ways of taking the subject's temperature, so to speak. One of the most obvious ways is to pay attention to the subtleties of their breathing. The more I've paid attention to the subtleties of my own breathing, previously, the more reliable the information I gain from empathizing with their current physical condition. as indicated by their breathing patterns. I make myself sensitive to their breathing by imitating how they are breathing.

The thoughts their breathing associates with are created by my breathing the same way. That, and we talk. I listen to and visually observe their breath, and recreate it in my own breathing, and talk to them and listen to the tenure of their voice, and I generally can put something together that makes them feel indebted to me for doing that.

I've had people tell me they've never heard of someone having tenure with their voice. They tell me that tenure is only used in association with having a permanent job. Usually in an institution. I say the persona is a subjective institution and each persona can certainly be considered a job. If operating a persona as a means of identity and individuation is concerned, then it's not only a job with tenure, but a career for good or ill.

Lovin' Mah Self

I've let the whole day go by without writing much. I may have composed a couple of e-mails that didn't amount to nothing. I haven't gone anywhere. Not even to the cafe or the grocery store. I had some food here that I fixed for myself without too much trouble. My youngest brother dropped by with an almost full bottle of wine he and his wife thought might have been opened too long. He wanted to know if I wanted it if it wasn't vinegary. I tasted a touch of it to check it out, and there was a tartness to it, but i said I'd give it a try. I've cut way back on my wine drinking since I've been on this medicine.

I've not drank anything but wine for a long time now. Cheap red burgundy for the most part. You know, the kind you can buy at the grocery store. I'm not much of a connoisseur. I always thought I would be if I ever came into some sort of financial wind fall, but now that I have to take medicine to even be able to write this entry I guess that idea is pretty much shot too, whether I win the lottery or not. I can't just eat or drink anything I wanna. I have to eat and drink what will stay down.

It's not as bad as I may be painting it. I mean, it would be for sure if I wasn't taking this methotrexate or something like it. You've heard of some medicine that it will either cure you or kill you, well, this stuff ain't known for curing RA, and neither is any other store-bought drug. It's either take this medicine with any or all of the side effects of taking it or suffering a continuum of excruciating, bone-rattling pain. Sometimes it's that way whether I take the drug or not.

I've really spent a good amount of time recently thinking about the idea that the pearl I describe frequently arrived here imbued with three basic attributes that will survive whatever bodies it creates or occupies when they're long gone, and this world and the one above it are vaporware too.

I've contemplated the notion of this pearl having volition and curiosity for as long as I've been aware of it, but the idea that it also contains it's own memory system has really started to make sense. Sense in the way I'm presently attempting to explain.

The pearl having it's own module or cache of me-mores from the gitgo is what fascinates me for the last couple of days. Moreso, that pertinent memories of this weird lifetime will be stored there too. I've associated this with the packet or pouch the main careactor of the Hero Journey stories carries with it when it conjures for an answer to it's oracular approach to manifesting long-term me-more-ree-s.

I'm reaching for a descriptor that will indicate a method of manipulating the content of the long-term memores that has accumulated over billions of life times in various forms, and might be the very angels said to be dancing on the head of a pin. I could have better models to reach for to approximate small. I didn't spend much time in laboratories or science class labs where they kept microscopes that let it's operator see really small things.

I looked minimally through a microscope at one-celled animals like amoebas. I identified the creatures I was supposed to in order to get a passing grade, but the experience was kind of ho-hum to me. Doing that never inspire me to an avocation or hobby through instruments to make things either small or large. I like seeing macro photos of bugs and plants. I seem particularly attracted to seeing the patterns in snowflakes at high magnification, but I can't see myself jumping through no hoops to do it myself.

There are subjects or topics that interest me that I actually have jumped through hoops for. Extreme hoops. Life-threatening hoops. Hoops I came close to abandoning my very life for, and a few times, other people's lives than mine to boot.

There is a autistic-like detachment I seem able to enter in order to survive in situations where the only, but very real danger is becoming distracted and losing my focus and concentration. Sometime it's like I get inside this state of being-for-myself and the more the powers that be try to root me outta there by distracting my focus, the more determined I become to create an impenetrable barrier of nothingness that literally subsumes the ground-of-being that allows for their ex-is-tense.

That's what happened to yesterday. I wrote a string of opinions inspired by various e-mails I would have normally answered and forgotten, but instead of mailing them I published them on this blog, and edited them over and over for about 12-14 hours.

I'm surprised I didn't delete them and move on. It happens. I was editing those posts like I might be mindlessly playing a slot machine in a casino. I wouldn't be playing and expecting to win. That wasn't the point. I figure the reason I ain't done squat today is to rest up from creating nothingness yesterday.

Whatta ya' do when there's nothing to do, and the world is sitting heavy on you, and the pressure comes down with the force of despair, and the will that you won't kind of stuns. Where do you go when there is nowhere to go, and the place that you're at is kinda blue, and you been everywhere but the stars up above, and you feel like you've been up there too? What do you see when there is nothing to see, and the things that you do see are not true, and you look deep inside for the child who has died, and the place it occupied is gone too?

Oh, Lord of mah haid take mah senses away, and take me away from this world of desire. Because, the feelings I've got from frustration and fear take me away from loving myself.

What? You Didn't Get That E-mail I Spent Hours Writing?

This blog entry is made up of responses I composed. They got to be too long for e-mail posts, so I just posted them here instead of actually sending them to the people who inspired them. Nobody missed a thing.

Gnosis provides the imbued person with their own universal identity by revealing who they've always been. The way this happened to me was that I "saw" in vision everything that I'd ever been since arriving here on Earth billions of years ago. Not only did this resolve my identity crisis at the age of thirty, when this vision occurred, but it provided with this relational database of universal perspective to investigate the stuff that keeps popping up since my identity crisis was resolved. 

Once this happens and you know who you are, it doesn't mean that what you'd previously been led to believe you were just disappears and you don't have to deal with it anymore. There's lots of graven images that offer examples of how gnostics dealt with who-they-thought-they-were once their encounter with God revealed their old, old story.

In the Jesus stories this problem is solved by a form of suicide-by-cop. They crucify the mofo relatively soon after the age of thirty, and that might fit the story in the Gospel of Judas about how his "betrayal" of Jesus probably wasn't depicted in it's true light to or by anybody. There is an equivalent modern saying: Don't trust anybody over thirty. 

Other stories that appear to be coming to light now, particularly since a sort of Rosetta Stone has been found for the Mayan language and the linguists are now translating the literal words carved in stone depicting to a greater degree the ordinary life style of the Mayans. There seems to be a theme or correlation between people getting crucified, sacrificed, and regicide.

Regicide seems to be symbolic of he kind of absolute power that corrupts absolutely. World saviors of immense variety seem to be plagued by it generation after generation. All fall down.

It can almost appear as if these individuals are given total and corrupting power just for the point of killing them for having or for once having it. There seem to be lots of stories about how these dethroned, defrocked careactors are humiliated and shamed constantly to prove to them they're not God. Of course, if they die in the process of being debunked, that proves the prosecutions side, But, it ain't always easy. Rasputin and Julius Caesar for instance. There's been a constant problem for white guys letting the fact that some not-so-paled-faced tribes already had the idea they were Gods before they ever saw them. Then, when they got to the places where they had this ensconce reputation, and they told the dark natives that there God was a man resurrected from the dead, the dark natives killed them to watch them come back to life.

I guess that makes sense in the way you look at it. I guess I might have been comparing the Jesus stories with the contents of the Tibetan Book of the Dead. There, when your physical body yields to temptation and croaks, the biggest problem the dead person faces (according to this rap) is realizing they're dead.

If one were to take the other rituals for the dead around the globe it might appear numerous cultures think the dead realizing they're dead is a big... and an initial problem... that waiting more than three days to observe the rituals for dead people will be too late. The ritual is performed to help the dead person's spirit realize they're dead, and to forget about their former life in order to deal with what's coming down the pike.

Colors. They gonna be some entities full of a pure color (at first), and the idea is that when these colors show up, then you gotta let yourself be absorbed by them to move on to your next fate. The first one is the highly touted white light, and if you let yourself be absorbed into it you have all the choices available, including getting the hell outta Dodge and hanging around with the other Buddhas.

You're more likely gonna miss out on this light because you gotta be extremely prepare to let it happen in a New York minute, and as you might realize, there ain't much chance of that happening if you don't know that you're really dead and don't have to worry about somebody stealing your money, burning your house down, and/or impregnating your wife with their child and get you to raise it and leave it well off. You gotta know you're dead when you actually are. 

The civil rights movement was God's way of extending my pubescent rebellion for the rest of my life. Both came to the fore in my life at puberty. I was born in Mississippi in 1939. Nobody knew during this time that the Great Depression would soon be over when America went to war in 1941. Before the war people couldn't buy what they needed so easily because there won't no jobs that paid nothing. Might as well rob a bank. 

Right about the time I was born in 1939 toward what proved to be the end of the Great Depression, things began to look up because there began to be more war jobs and a swelling military population, and while there was a lot more cash money around, a lot of the products money might buy were rationed for the war effort, so I was introduced to the hypocrisy of being a minor player in the black market the grown-ups acted like didn't exist around certain people

Puberty is not physically or morally designed to last past maybe the late teens at best. Three score, ten later the resentment associated with being forced to eat Jim Crow from my early twenties on, is something I feel like I've finally reached as much resolution with as I'm gonna. 

Waterboarding On My Brain

It may seem odd, but I've never hypnotized a single person who didn't find an inimitable black stick figure in their heart of hearts, and by their own description, they were each duty-bound to flesh out their own figure of darkness with the tools required to see both sides now. It's as if each soul is meant to tame both darkness and light in order to jump the broom with at-one-ment. 

I just watched a video of another conservative radio talk show host that temporarily got stupid and volunteered to undergo what he could handle by being waterboarded:

http://rawstory.com/blog/2009/05/conservative-radio-hosts-waterboarded/

One can watch the results of what happens when he does get waterboarded and he seems to have changed his mind dramatically. No blame. All cowboy hat and no cattle. Maybe the experience will make him more cautious.

I've watched a couple of videos about Jesse Ventura. I like his hokum. I'd probably vote for him if he ran for office just to see the show. What impressed me was when he stated that every person who goes through SEAL training gets waterboarded as part of what they have to endure to become a SEAL. He said it was part of the way they're trained to deal with being captured and/or tortured.

If it's normal procedure for SEALS to have to endure this as part of their initial training, then it's gotta happen with all the other "special services" groups in the various branches of the armed services like the Delta Force, and probably the CIA and FBI, and coming soon to your local and regional Homeland Security members. If one were to include the present members of these institutionalized groups and the past active members that are still living, that's a lotta people who have experienced being waterboarded. 

If there were a way to get a statement from all the people who have been waterboarded in the name of patriotism and religion and other seemingly legitimate reasons, I'd like to ask them their opinions on what they've experienced through the media as this torture exposition has exploded on the world stage.

For me, a person born seventy years ago into a very different cultural environment and raised in various locations throughout the infamous Bible Belt, and who was carried to the bowels of a rather moderate First Baptist Church before I could roll over or crawl on my hands and knees, the idea of waterboard as it was exposed by the media was vaguely familiar, but I didn't realize the real connection until later.

The first memory I think of when I reach for personal experience to find a worthy representation of what waterboarding could do to me was being baptized in that little Baptist Church via total immersion, which included the seldom recognized "second dunk". Upon recalling that, there is no way I can be convinced I haven't been waterboarded. Waterboarded from the Baptist Church is concerned in event that was good for me and insured my being saved from sin and darkness. I'm not so sure. I don't think I ever have been all that sure this was a good thing. Five years later I rebelled forever against it.

The "second dunk" happens when the preacher appears to be lifting your head out of the water and just when your mouth clears the surface of the water, and you're reaching for a huge gulp of air, he dunks you again for good measure and you thinking you're drowning. In my case I thought I was dead for a moment, and then the preacher lifted me out of the water and saved me, and I came away from the experience thinking that I owed him my life. I was nine years old.

I've written previously about how my central quest for most of my life was to uncover the source reasons for how I can so easily be used by charismatic people. I think my experience with full immersion baptism made me real flexible and easy to get along with when it happened at the age of nine years old. By that I mean that I'll give it up and I'll give it up fast and with such determination to nip it in the bud, that some authoritative figures question the value of my testimony, and let me walk on.

I don't want nothing to do with anything that resembles what i experienced when I was double-dunked baptized. It, I'm beginning to wonder, may have had more to do with why I chose a quest centered around understanding charisma. It probably wasn't charisma that set me up for the fall as much as it was total immersion baptism. I'll tell you anything you wanna know and more, much more, before you ever think to resort to waterboarding or it's equivalent.

Jesse Ventura stated that he could waterboard another conservative talk show host maned Hannity into confessing with total conviction that his hero George Bush was a disgusting war criminal. I believe him. But, on the other hand, his strutting braggadocio might cause me to create an additional barrier for my voting for him if he runs for national office. Jesse "The Body" Ventura would have to volunteer to be waterboarded again himself to see if he could resist being convinced of George Bush's worthiness as well. Aye, and there's the rub. What part of your person could stand up to or survive waterboarding?

Here's a picture of American soldiers in Viet Nam waterboarding this guy. It looks like they're amused by it:

http://www.npr.org/templates/common/image_enlargement.php?imageResId=15895650&imageStoryId=15886834

"Words Are All I Have To Steal Your Heart Away"

I wrote the poem below yesterday. It's rigged. There's no resemblance to what I wrote on first impulse, and now, I don't remember my intent so well.

The Overflow Of The Heart

The menu is not the meal even in an ambiance that's surreal,
and a wrinkled map is not the territory beneath your heel.
But, if you meet a local trollop who's reputed to pack a wallop,
don't forget she'll stomp rudely through yo' polyps turning cartwheels.

It's said the blackguard in your backyard plies a mean ruse
knowing the stick figures in your heart can bear no sad news,
He deposits them in the maze of the blue stone's purple haze,
to do tricks upon your slick, droll plays to light your short fuse.

He sits inside the the guarded walls to sing his sad dirge
for removing the curse transmuting his father's old urge,
He works being-for-others instead of having his druthers,
and gives nod to sound and seeing in his strong upsurge. 

felix manos peregrino
Thursday, May 21, 2009
Extensively edited today

The restaurant I ate lunch today with it Fiftie's theme seems out of place in this small town. It's a franchise. There's a couple more of them around in the small towns here and yon. It's called Andy's. I've been there before a few times. Less than the fingers on my left hand.

They have a special where you get the cheeseburger all-the-way with french fries and a large Pepsi for $4.99, and it's a half-pound fresh meat hamburger. If you like fresh meat hamburgers hot off the grill, and I do, it seems like a pretty good deal.

There have been plenty of open booths and seats every time I'm been there. Usually right at lunch. I don't feel self conscious about taking my LA Times puzzle book inside with me and playing word games. Not fancy word games. Just Sunday Sized expert level crossword puzzles that have some very clever puzzle editors. I hardly ever finish one of these puzzles in one sitting, but I don't mind. Since there is always open booths I take my time and enjoy myself.

Andy's features music from the 50's too. I swore I'd never be like my father who found the Lawrence Welk Show to be like attending church. Today, sitting there at Andy's working my crossword puzzle I found myself listening to the lyrics of the song on the jukebox system. C'mon, it's a 50's theme restaurant. They gotta have a juke box. But, this song wasn't a 50's song that I know of.

"It's only words,
but, words are all I have
to give my heart away."

~ Words, sung by The Beegees

I heard the chorus two ways. The first was that words was all they had to give their heart away, and the second one was that words were all they have to take her love away. Works for me. I was writing about how coming into consciousness of realizing we're asleep and dreaming provides us with words to take over the direction of our dreams. Words are all we have to take over the direction of our day time dreams too, but they're much more elaborate lives. We created the entire world with words.

¡Claro!

If I were to casually take a lucid daydream as an imaginary bubble that enveloped me like a cocoon, but it did nothing to stop me from doing as I pleased or told me "No!". That is, if it spoke to my curiosity at all, feigned anger or no, or regarded me as a person in it's detached, incremental endeavors, unless I asked it the right question at the right time in some arbitrary "right way."

I didn't and still don't understand the whole gambit unto this day. How it was usually a question I had addressed in frustration to the wide open spaces allone with myself, and did not entertain the remotest notion of expecting any response at all. As if I were innocent and free without threat of bondage to curse God without a care. Some unthoughtful and terse question created more for making a rude statement than for soliciting a wise answer.

This bubble of is-ness doesn't seem to care whether I've been naughty or nice or have pretentiously feigned Being in any certain method at all. It's just that sometimes it is there for me to perceive in some odd manner, form or fashion, and I know in real time that it's there.

That frightening facticity alone makes me nervous. Maybe it ain't here to judge me, who knows, it's not me or of me, I didn't create it (I'm not THAT good), but I've sorta belligerently created my own fate by my subjective choice of the rules of conscience I adopted, okay, sorta in ignorance. So, I'm guilty as sin for being wot I am is. There is no one else to blame. I can't change my damned spots... or... can I?

Carelessly conjuring inside the bubble is a bit like taking my life into my own hands, I KNOW! I could easily stand accused of appearing to bite the hand that cocoonishly entombs me, or else of seeming too arrogant for stepping forth to elicit the riddles of the Sphinx with aplomb and disdain.

Yet, once more foolish for overreaching without foreknowledge of the fatal price of answering it's riddles incorrectly. If I get lucky, and I ain't dead yet, then my bubble might get me out of trouble. Bubble, bubble, toil and trouble. I'm always out on a limb. I got no options. It seems demanded of me to-shit-or-get-off-the-pot. Woefully, once I'm committed by askance (I just HAD to ask... cocky fool!), I'm damned if I do, and damned if I don't.

"I'm innocent, I tell ya'. I wuz jest jiving, man. Gimme a brake? No?... NO? ... REALLY? (Sigh... ) Man! Whatta drag."

"Goodbye Joe, me gotta go, down by the bayou..."

It's irrefutable, pernicious denial, though not necessarily on my behalf, but to respond to some unseen rule of law beyond my unkempt kith and ken. I'm thinking of a spiritual bubble like this as sheer potential, and while I pretend I know it's there, I also know that sometime I ain't got the right mojo to make it go to work fo' me any time I like... and be mah bitch... of course, like bubble bitches oughta. Right? I get all worked up to counter, and sometime, it's not there. Gone, but not forgotten.

I'm haphazardly suggesting this bubble as potential alone forms the source of the dreaded species flaw, that of not being able to perceive one's own possibilities in real time, and yet that unpenetrable shining head can easily discern the possibles of others, "Run, Forrest... RUN!

I'm just playing this awakened consciousness/lucid daydreaming bit as 'life is a riddle'. Foolishly pretending that if I ask I will receive, but dubiously acting like I gotta ask the right question or the resolution of my prayers go unrequited, is truly disgusting to me, even though I'm surrounded by the bounty of the kingdom, and its there for the taking. This is a shameless, no-stone-left-unturned quest with impossible odds. I kinda wish I'd rather be fishing?

Percival purportedly missed out simply because he didn't ask the Grail King where it hurt. Boom! Gone away running, not to, but from, a life of computerized joy. The life I am living is not even my own, but the dream of a life by a golden-haired boy.

I'm proposing that what I wrote above, is what a lucid dream at night would be like if I somehow became aware that I was asleep and dreaming, and used that conscious awareness to shape the events and behavior of that dream into a ditty about "computerized joy".

What's the difference between becoming consciously aware and shaping the reality you find yourself engulfed by upon awaking, from what never was or will be, by the use of woids... 7/24... night and day? "In the bejinning..." blah, blah, blah. How else can a homo sapiens individual create their own reality to match the herd and the environment changed by it's presence.

How can that be done without adopting mutual rules of conscience? Herd behavior seems typified by their unquestioning, perhaps incoherent response to the unified code of some ancient and presently unknowable singularity?

Humans do that and more. The "more" that they do is called their me-mores (Stashed in they aura, and blindingly bright when rectified. ¡Claro!). Their more-than-you-can-see-me. It's the unperceived part both you and me can't see without crude insight. Nor they themselves see because of their own purified brightness. From the inside all is nothing. Civilization is what is re-me-d from the kingdom. It's what happens when the hero returns and manifest their stolen and smuggled gifts before God and man. Life is nothing more than man's memoirs. What a damned, niggardly shame. Even more so if I can work it.

Chili Con Carne

Ben's got a new passion. A project. He's always in the market for a project that he can really get into and play the odds. He's very good at it. He has a new project practically every time I see him, and they all end up tanked from his getting bored with them and ignoring the attention they need to subsist. I guess that's what we have the most in common about.

I remember during the years of my teen age angst asking my father why people didn't just live on their own land and be satisfied with what it sot before? "Taxes.", he told me. You gotta pay your taxes with cash. Subsistence farming is just hard work with no rewards other than merely surviving. No government barters for taxes. Either you pay them in the coin of the realm the current Caesar dictates or they come and take what you have, and you'll be lucky they don't kill you for their troubles, and your family to boot. Life's a bitch, and then you die.

So, that was it. God had used my father as an oracle in order to tell me the God's own truth. You'd think I'd give it up and concede to the way things are, but I didn't, and still haven't. I didn't ask to be born. Not that I'm consciously aware of. Who I am was before this wasn't asked it's opinion. It was put upon me by the sky gods. The Debil not withstanding.

If I weren't asked to come here, and I was either sent here or sent enced to be here, then as far as I'm concerned, the world definitely owes me a living. Even murderers and rapists get fed enough to keep them alive when they're put in a cage, even if it's just long enough to hang 'em. "Hang 'em from the highest treeeeeee... Oh, woman would you weeeep fo' me?" (Roger Miller) I've thought that way since I was a child just old enough to comprehend the ways of the world. A week or so ago I turned seventy years old, and the world has thus far recognized it's debt and fed me and kept me (for the most part) out of the weather when it shows it's displeasure.

It's a little ridiculous for me to write this, but when I look back at the things I've done to learn how to live, I automatically reflect on what I've learned about how to die. Today, I'm think it is about chants and hymns and mantras and death wishes. I can dismiss the fundamentalist ways the moderate Southern Baptist Church I attended as a child, but it's not so easy for me to trivialize the hymns I learned in my youth. When I take a hymnal and find those familiar hymns we sang ritually every Sunday, the lyrics can be a completely different missive than how the local church interpreted them to be like.

The series of extemporaneous mutterings and shoutings of the traveling evangelists, itinerate preachers, and long-faced ministers that flowed through the local churches I attended (usually holding my older sisters and/or mother's hand) was truly amazing. More so now, in my memores, than it's true facticity can reveal. '-)

I can't tell the difference between now and then so much anymore anyway. Presently I'm questioning if I ever could know one thing from the other in real time all that coherently. Ever. At least to my own satisfaction. Most of that (that wot flutters down to my me in syncopated tappings and symbolic tapestries) are interspersed with the dream time along with all the other hypnagogic colors and potentials at the end of the rainbow.

Maybe life imitated art. Maybe I did get something from those Jackson Pollock painting I never could fathom in real time. Then, when I stood myself before them and let my eyes roam whimsically as they would, one following the other in complete and utter devotion, I didn't get it. I walked away disappointed. In retrospect, however, when I'm lost in thought, and wandering the uncluttered halls of some daft miasmic vision, I recognized in some haphazardous immediacy that Pollock painted places I could visit and recognize in my own mind. He was a sort of landscape painter of interior potentialities, all spattered around, waiting for the ti-me to co-me when the chance was gone.

There was no "thee" in the museum painting itself. I couldn't me-and-thee with the painting proper. Without me-and-thee-ing to give my visit meaning I was forced to walk away from those graven images. They weren't the thing-in-itself. Like "my country 'tis of thee" is. "'tis of thee"? What the hell is that? "... 'tis of thee." "...'tis of thee"... sweet land of liberty... of "thee" I sing. I think maybe this "thee" isn't a somethingness that can be lifted upon a pedestal for to be worshiped or sung to in your usual way.

All Fall Down ~ Herlihy

I've never taken 'thee' out for a walk before. Yes, I know I've promised.. and broken that promise... and promised and broken it again. But, this time, baby girl, I'm telling you the God's own truth... I hope my die... I am is. I wrote a poem once and entitled it Who Will Be My Woman Tonight hoping the song would do my work for me, and the girls would just come right up and ask me to make love to them and give them a baby before any of the other girls did it first. It rarely worked, but when it did I felt like a blooming genius for conceiving it.

There is a pattern to my madness. There is something very reliable about that simple fact. There is a hole in the bottom of the sea. There a whole on the bottom of the sea. There's a hole... there is a whole... there's a hole in the bottom of the sea. It's a simile to the taste I like in Campbell's Tomato Juice. The wonderful thing about Campbell's Tomato Juice is that it always tastes predictably the same. That's exactly what I want from a condiment, because I in deed taste it way before i ever put the pan on the stove.

I don't like the tomato paste stuff used with "original Italian cooking". The idea of eating tomatoes that have been stewing on the stove for hours and hours make me wanna puke. That's what made people think tomatoes are poisonous. Anything that eats the lining of your intestinal tract away should be considered poisonous. I prefer the sweet taste of fresh tomato juice. Puree-ing fresh tomatoes and cooking with them right off the vine omits the bitter taste life must be like in old Italy. Tradition is a great burden from which one can only run... run for your life!

I make spaghetti and chili the same way. To me, spaghetti is just boiled pasta with chili on it. When I'm fat, like I am now, I leave off the pasta and call the spaghetti sauce, chili. What's simple is easy. I had to stop writing to go downstairs to check on the chili I'm making now. I'm spoiled for my own chili. I make it with plain reconstituted Campbell's Tomato Juice because there ain't no such thing as ripe tomatoes for sale anymore. Just fiberous red vegetation designed for shelf life. Campbell's a sweet tasting reconstituted tomato juice that probably has lots of sugar in it, but I'm beyond the point of caring. I have an incurable disease, and I'm gonna enjoy what I can before it gets to where I can't feed myself. When that happens, and it's only a matter of ti-me, I'll try to come around and act grateful. Either that or die in a strait jacket for being a bother.

I think one of the more basic reasons I have lived to be seventy years old is because I prefer to eat out, and especially, to choose from a menu, and be waited on like I was the Sheik Of Araby, and thereby have avoided for a very long time having to eat food I've cooked for myself. The other reason I feel like has helped me to stay alive is to have thought about killing myself practically every day since the turn of puberty.

My first wife was a great cook. In fact, she was a professional dietician who supervised the diets of hundreds of hospital patients on a daily basis. It's no wonder she wasn't all that charmed by the idea of cooking for me when she got home. I had a trophy wife who I couldn't afford. In fact, it happened twice. Why am I always the last to know?

The Linville River Gorge

I can't imagine someone not seeing in technicolor. I always have, that's why. If I didn't see in technicolor I couldn't imagine what people saw that could. I don't know what difference it could make one way or the other. My younger brother is color blind. I don't know which colors it is that he can't see. I do know that he says whatever it is forces him to become an expert in recognizing shapes. He finds arrowheads and other grounded things that other people ignore and step over. He sees the shape, and normal visioned folk mostly recognize color to distinguish nay-me-d (named) thangs.

One of the other thangs I can't imagine is not being able to sit here in my room and re-member myself in all the places I've ever been in the world. I've seen two right good-sized river gorges by foot. The Grand Canyon one out West where it's high and dry, and Linville Gorge right here in the mountains of North Carolina. They're both gorges, but there is a world of difference in the sight of them. I leave my body here and go back to visit frequently. I'm surround by folk my age here that never been nowhere. Don't seem to have harmed them at all. They got the same stuff they started out with, and not having nothing more than that never caused a ruckus.

I went to Linville Gorge while it was still in private ownership with my first father-in-law. I never knew the second one. He worked for the man who owned it. Big textile magnate back in the day when textiles was North Carolina's second biggest money-maker. They sold all those textile factories they could to China. Lock, stock, and barrel. Then, they criminalized the use of tobacco, which was the first money-maker in the state. I honestly don't know what people do for money around here any more, but there's more of them than ever, so I guess they're getting by.

I'm shocked at the new features of The Dictionary that comes with the Mac. I just now highlighted the words "Linville Gorge", then right-clicked the highlighted words. The dialog box that popped out gave me a choice of checking out the words on Google or opening the Dictionary. I opened the Dictionary. In the dialog box that follow the program automatically looked up "Linville Gorge" in Wikipedia, and there it was with a picture to boot. In every Mac program I used. Even when I'm typing in the browser, the spellchecker is right there with the Dictionary too.

The ease with which this happens IS shocking to me. I have a perfectly good unabridged dictionary sitting right here beside my desk not three feet away, and I haven't used it since I switched back to using Macs. They're just designed for creative people and all their whimsical little needs. A lot of what amazes me about the Mac rig I'm using has to do with the Internet. They're so interconnected now.

What happened is a perfect example of what I'm writing about. I'm sitting here wasting time enow by writing stuff to try to capture drifting thoughts. I remember Linville Gorge and the fishing trip I was taken as a guest on to the Linville River. I'm sitting here on the coastal plains remembering how astounded I was that fish could even live in the shallow little creek, and I was catching catfish left and right. CATFISH! Up in the freaking mountains!

We needed to catch them left and right. When we dressed them out and fried them for supper it took five or six of those fish to make us feel like we even eaten anything. Them ol' boys was having a hell of a time thinking they wuz eating some sho' nuff fish, when just one of the catfish from around here would have feed all of them without all the fuss and fritter.

I think them catfish up in Linville Gorge are a different species than the ones we catch down here in the swamps of the Atlantic Ocean coastal plains. There are catfish caught in the Cape Fear River not thirty miles from here that weigh over two hundred pounds. The Cape Fear is a major river. It literally runs deep and wide, and them big cats grow in all the big rivers around the Southeastern United States. I don't know about up north and out in California.

I do know about some little catfish that grow out in the shallows of the Gulf of Mexico, because sorting the shrimp we dragged up there was made tedious by those little catfish. They had long sharp fins on the backs and were about 3-4 inches long. That would be the adult version. I never saw none bigger than that. Don't quote me, they could be bigger, but, I remember them suckers for the pain they caused me.

We'd be grabbing those shrimp we had poured on the deck (along with everything else that fell outta the draw net), and sorting them by size in an assortment of plastic tubs to market later. That was my job as a deck hand. We usually worked as fast as we could to get done before we hauled the nets up again. Everything that gets done on a shrimp boat gets done between when they haul in the nets. Eating, sleeping, and jacking yo' jaws.

The problem with the Gulf Coast catfish was that if you weren't careful to avoid them that spine might stick into your hands, and they has something poisonous on them, and that longish spine might stick slam through your fingers or your hand, and it really, really hurt! Not only that, but you wouldn't get over it by the time you did it again. Well, at least for a beginner it was usually that way, and even the experienced people would reach for the wrong thing occasionally.

That's what I'm talking about. What the hell do you do if you ain't ever done much but the same thing over and over... until you're too pooped to pop... and you lay down to die? What? You never worked on a shrimp boat off Louisiana and Texas for Cajun people you couldn't possibly understand until your hands swolled up as big as ham? No wonder you have to play golf until you drop.

Merrily, Merrily, Merrily, Merrily...

One of the reasons I write this crap is to get to the non-crap part. When I enter flow I write all sorts of strange stuff that I can't prove or want to prove. I'm not here on Earth in the role of a world savior. I just like to write. I've never submitted one word to a publisher in the hope I'd get rich and famous. That would spoil it for me. I know some writers who have been published. They seem to end up not liking themselves very much. Many times they end up murdering theyselves.

I've run into some material that some consider to be secret stuff, but, in my opinion, it's not a secret at all. It's just that, so far, I haven't been satisfied with my descriptions. By form it's difficult to hold one ideation in place while I hold another ideation in place by which to compare it. It is what it's not, and it not what it is. So-me call this dilemma a paradox.

I'm trying to describe it in terms of lucid dreaming. I've had lucid dreams before, but not deliberately. By that, I mean to say I've never had much luck deliberately setting out to do lucid dreaming before I went to sleep at night, and then have it happen when I doze off. When it happens, it happens spontaneously or not at all.

I don't wanna get into no long diatribe about my efforts in the past to enter lucid dreaming of my own free will. I've kept dream diaries/journals in several different eras in my seventy year old life in some futile attempt to realize I'm dreaming in real time, and control what happens in the dream once I do. Lucid dreaming at night after I enter the sleep cycles at night are not that interesting to me any more.

What is interesting to me about lucid dreaming is that I do practically the same thing when I wake up in the morning to prepare to do lucid dreaming during my waking hours. I think I'm addressing the same state of being as when I get "lost in time" driving my car on familiar routes. I forget what happens during the time I'm driving when I get where I'm going as I do when I forget the haphazardness of the usual dreams I entertain at night. Say, by ten a.m., they're gone unless they were a sex dream I experienced pleasure in or a horrid nightmare.

The thing about lucid dreaming at night while I'm asleep is that when I wake up enough to realize I'm currently dreaming, I appear to be able to take control of the dream and do what I wanna do instead of dreadfully anticipate where this dream is gonna go next. Isn't this the exact same ritual I engender when I become conscious in the morning. True, I usually have to urinate before I can start planning my day, but I do plan my day when I wake up just like I might plan a dream when I become aware that I'm dreaming.

"Row, row, row your boat
merrily down the stream.
Merrily, merrily, merrily, merrily...
Life is but a dream."

Sunday's Entry. Unknowingly Written in Disappearing Ink?

I feel totally helpless about getting my disappearing, previously published entries back from the vaporware crypt. Google is a huge company full of people who seem perfectly willing to pass the buck if you're not rich and/or famous. I'm sure I would be. I don't have the power or the time to devote to haranguing these kept geniuses to find my missing entries. I got nothing to reward them with for doing it except sharply honed insults. They already got their's, why bother?

It's not like the world will suffer if my (missing and previously published on Blogger.com [Ergo, Google]'s watch) entries are never found and restored to their rightful Home. I knew they're still alive, poor babies, but like inmates on some huge server farm where they get ignored by the words of better, less demented writers. I write the same stuff over and over again. Hoping that some small typo or editing mistake will force me in a different direction or present me with an interesting challenge that might allow me to make a mountain out of a molehill as a form of self-amusement. I don't really care. I never read this crap after I publish it anyway.

Since in the Enneagram system for thinking about things it is written that people like me are doomed to poverty because of their own false promises to docetic idols, I'll never be able to afford professional entertainers to amuse me when I feel despondent. Another reason I've been condemned to poverty is because I was taught to do things for myself instead of hiring professionals. It's cheaper, and a good reason to have more kids if I could do that any more. I can't even afford to pay someone to do it for me.

Using other people or rather using their money is the most admired system for becoming financially independent invented so far. I'm thinking maybe the reason the idea of kings coming into ex-is-tense was to grasp the possibilities evinced by the delegation of authority.

Simultaneously, there is another way. An appropriate way to rid oneself of the responsibilities associated with delegating authority by abandoning desire. If you don't need the results accomplished by groups working together under the leadership of a literal (or for all practical purposes) king, then why be burdened by form without content? Retreat by feigning insanity?

In my frequently ignored opinion, many people get controlled by their subjective, trumped-up desire for respect among their peers. Some consider it disrespectful to their family and friends by daring to pretend to a world-view outside of their own litter box. Why risk being shunned by those who have pretended to love you as social contract? You might get told, "You just ain't right, boy!", and get rudely pulled back into the crab bucket. Some are afraid they'll be accused of being crazy if they don't toe their culture's lines. Which begs the question to be asked: How can you abide with the pain of ridicule long enough to learn to ignore it, and thus, abandon that particular ship of fools? It may not be possible, but some say It may have to be carried out by remaining mentally balanced while pretending otherwise. Many homo sapiens have a predictable, instinctual response to paradox. "It takes two bowls..."

Paradox as misdirection can be used to create a cloud of confusion in which retreat appears as a state of flow. Just walk away. Don't wait until they resolve the paradox on their own terms. Such can be taken by some that the confusion of paradox is a deliberate act of provocation. As if they've been taken for a sucker. The idea is to be constantly vigilant in order to abandon common sense and mutual respect for an escape route, and a fanciful mirage to hide behind if some belligerent spoilsport can't take a joke. '-)

What this has to do with event horizons can seem puzzling at first. Castenada claimed that prowling the event horizon was a great and greedy eagle that breeds humans in order to steal the consciousness they develop during their brief lives. The trick is to trick the eagle into accepting the flashy persona you've used to give added-value to the spirit, instead of the docetic spirit that accompanies the body throughout.

If you have stored your treasures on Earth, and what you have here as a human is all you know and all you know to value, then when this tiny little solar system gets pulled into the black hole past the event horizon at the center of what we call The Milky Whey, it's all over but the screaming... well, and the screeching too. '-)

How can your focus on erecting icons to matter on pedestals like the Earth when you know it's gonna be gobbles up eventually by some black hole. Sickness, war, old age, and Death are yo' friends. They force humans to abandon hope for storing up treasures on Earth. Why do that if your physical body is not immortal, and the un-nay-me-able, docetic spirit doesn't remember the abstract corner you painted yourself in from one lifetime to the next? How can you ignore watching your body waste away without eventually realizing you're not gonna be around to enjoy those "treasures"?

If your children have any sense at all they will decide to hate you in order to follow their own spirit that condemned them to coming to Earth School. If you had any sense you'd never have children, and the band plays on.

I disclaim knowing the truth except in real time. By the time you read this what I tried to describe in real time is mere history. An embarrassment really. It reveals my addiction to capturing drifting thoughts with words. Some I make up to suit the occasion. Why would I not? You're only gonna read what you would have meant if you had written these sa-me words. I pretend to address that pretense in anticipation and for the sole purpose of my own amusement. Selah

Read Fast. My Last Three Entries Are Missing. Evaporated. Gone

Getting all worked up about the new search engine is the kind of behavior that has been the bane of my existence. I signed up to get a news letter when they were going online, and I got nothing. I found out accidently they intended to go online at 8 p.m. Eastern Daylight Time, and things got screwed up and it didn't happen like they hoped it would. I finally got to ask my first question, "What's what?" I didn't expect an answer. I was hoping to be surprised by getting any sort of answer, but instead it broke my browser, and I had to reboot it twice.

http://www.wolframalpha.com/

This morning when I got up the site was online and apparently working as designed. I asked five or six questions of it. I only got one answer. I asked it for the weather in my home town on the day that I was born in 1939, and sure enough, it came up with a definitive answer, and a bunch of charts and graphs to illustrate what was going on at the moment I was born down in Mississippi.

I guess I'm still excited about this project. I clicked my way to their employment page and looked at the kind of people they were seeking to hire. I'd say they're looking for a well-rounded group. They've posted the names of the subjects they might have better information on than others, and if they expand their database in these areas alone I'll be able to use it occasionally.

What really excites me about this is that it really can work as an oracle. When they get the database built up in enough areas of interest the only limitation will be asking the right question. It's the same problem with all oracles. The thing about a competent oracle is that it teaches you to ask the right question. Becoming an expert at asking the right question the first time is magical. Even if you don't get it right every time, just getting it right occasionally can change lives.

I'm curious about whether Google will get involved in this endeavor. I'm only thinking of Google contributing to the database for the good of the whole. The fact that this site will be available to any and all from anywhere in the world is very exciting. It really levels the playing ground across the entire spectrum of humanity for anybody, anywhere, to be able to get answers to their problems directly. It's my sense of things that Google and Yahoo search engines will open their huge databases to at least some degree.

I used the Wilhelm/Baynes translation of the I Ching as an oracle daily for over thirty years. One morning I woke up hearing a familiar authoritative voice telling me, "Stop using the I Ching." I knew immediately that I had to do it. I was heart-broken, but I knew I was totally obsessed, and that my stopping using the book as an oracle was kismet. It was my fate.

My habit of turning to the oracle to question it about what I should do about the most trivial matter had overshot the mark. Typical Mercury-in-Aries stunt. Any planet that occupies Aries will have it's assigned constructs pushed to the limit and then beyond even that to the point of being silly and foolish. True, that's the negative side of Mercury-in-Aries. How do you know how far you can go with something if you don't occasionally go too far?

When I stumbled across Albert Einstein's natal astrology chart one day I discovered that he was born with Mercury in Aries too. As a matter of fact, it was the same degree of Aries as mine. I began to lazily contemplate what Arian characteristics we might share because of this coincident. One day I realized that what we might have in common is that bit about taking things too far. In his case, he didn't stop digging when others seem satisfied. He overshot the mark and invented the laws of general relativity... and whatever.. right? Einstein didn't know what was good for him. If he had, he'd have accepted the status quo. Instead he ran the risk of being dismissed as impractical and worked at his day job until he croaked.

One of the difficulties that can be encountered when one has a tendency to overshoot the mark is that they find themselves with nobody to talk to that has gone far enough to hear anything other than prattle when you pour your heart out to what you hope will be a kindred spirit. That can hurt so painfully that it takes a long time to recuperate, and some never do. As I understand it, most never do. I may never recuperate fully, but you'd have to know about the bottom of the barrel to recognize just how far I've come so far.

I've been thinking about how people, including me, perhaps especially me, lose track of ti-me. I'm thinking specifically about how I lose track of time when I'm driving a long distance. Particularly out West where the landscape turns brown and up on those plateaus where everything levels out and gets kind of monotonous. It doesn't apparently affect my driving. I just arrive some place I literally started out to get to and I don't know how I got them. I don't remember passing any familiar landmarks that keep me informed as I go along. I have to have done a competent job of driving because here I am. Right where I started out to go. Precisely where I started out to go. I just don't remember how.

In any conversation where this topic comes up, whether I'm the one who brings it up or somebody else, I don't remember a single time that most everybody present didn't agree that the same thing had happened to them, and a round of stories about these events would be a source of interest for a good long time. I'm led to believe by the frequency of these types of conversations, and the fact that most everybody involved had their own story, that it's a pretty human thing to happen to just about anybody who drives fairly long distances on occasion.

Presently, I'm wondering if losing track of time in this manner is not the status quo rather than something that happens rarely. I suspect those moments when after we've driven a long way without remembering how we got where we started, and we sort of wake up to the fact that the trip is over, whether we remember how we got there or not, that revelation, is the "waking up" the Buddha urges his devotees to seek with great passion.

I sorta think I remember being in that "lost track of time" phase for months and perhaps years at a time. Only occasionally waking up and realizing that I'd already gotten where I intended to go. My most profound example of this was working a welding job for about three months. I became friends with another welder who also played the guitar. Between us we arranged to go to this one bar and played guitars and sang and passed the hat for beer money. We did this 2-3 nights a week for a couple of months.

A few months or years later my brother and I were fitting pipe in the fabrication area of some farm land we were turning into a pharmaceutical plant. There were six steel fabrication tables separated by fireproof curtains to protect one fabrication team from the welding glare of the next team of fitter and welder. Great job. No climbing 50-100 feet in the air hauling all your tools and materials.

My brother walks up to my booth with a big grin on his face with his arm around this little guy dressed out in denim as a pipewelder. He's got a big smile on his face too. My brother proudly says in a joking way, "You remember this ol' boy don't you Bro?"

I did not. I was genuinely confused by their impudence. I truly thought they were playing a joke on me. I got a little testy that they were trying to get over. All the smiles went away. They thought I was playing a joke on them. They got mad. It was, of course, Donald Hatch. The selfsame guy I'd worked and played music with regularly for a month or two back in the day on that other job.

The foreman put him to work welding in the next fabrication booth to the one I worked in, and he was never friendly with me again. i lost three months, and all the occupants of that phase of my life except my brother. I got it back, but it was a really painful experience to think I'd treat somebody like that, but I wasn't lying. He just wasn't there for me as any kind of memory, much less a fond one.

I've taken the abstract, theoretical construct of projection way past the point of no return. I constantly know I'm projecting without option. I constantly know the other is projecting without option. I only hear what I think I would be saying if I said the sa-me words the other speaks, and I know the other only hears what they would have meant if they used the same words I used.

More and more I understand without option that we can both ignore each other and get along just fine. Physically, I spend 95% of my time completely alone. My most frequent visitors are my brother's dogs, who wander in and out of my house if the door is open like they own it. My brother and his wife are gone most every day, and I'm the only one around the dogs can protect. They gotta be possessive about somebody when their masters are away.

I'm a little concerned over my developing a "No more Mister Nice Guy" attitude about becoming who other people need me to be in order to recognize me as somebody they are acquainted with. I don't seem to care much anymore whether I act like they need me to or not. I've usually moved on and be-co-me-d with some other interesting persona they never knew. I've become so dismissive of the other's need for my assurance that they're okay that my attitude (or lack of it) tests their patience. No blame.

A Babe In Swaddling Clothes

It's that babe in a manger thing that sweeps me up in it just to be tossed away as insignificant tripe. It reminds me of the descriptions I've encountered in the media about stem cells. There is a state of being they're in before they become any particular type of stem cell, when they can be provoked into any sort of stem cell in particular. 

I don't know if this description represents the same thing I'm attempting to relate it to. I've been there consciously, but without consciousness as a result of imbibing the Diviner's sage sacrament. I wasn't a particular form of life, but I eventually found out that it's from this nebulous state of being I could be any form of life, but only in accord with the calling, and from how far away it's uttered.

I've hypnotized clients to re-experience their own birth, and then when they went through it, I would direct them to where they were before they were born, and they each described a similar type of situation to what I claim to have experienced in the situation I described above with the diviner's sage, and none of them knew each other face to face as nay-me-d objects. 

It was writing about that "third part" to Isabella that kicked this construct into gear. I had the distinct feeling in reflecting on this that the neutral stem cell, the babe in swaddling clothes, and my previously mentioned "third part" have much in common.

I propose there is a prenatal null point from which a no thing can be-co-me a some thing or any thing else at all. For so-me, there is a stupendous fear involved in turning the tables and be-co-me-ing no thing from so-me thing or any thing. It's not like this is my original idea. I'm trying to write about in the vernacular to see if I attract an "Amen!" or two by those who have had similar experiences.

I don't see this transmutation as all that possible for me as an individual, I may have come close before. I think the null point has to be approached more neutrally than I'm presently capable of, and I'd have to be able to carry the ability to initiate the transmutation into the null point with me, and have the consciousness necessary to understand my choices once being there was gained. Also, I'd have to get this all together and act on it before nature took it's course, and I "heard" a call from a frog or a chipmunk, and became that before I literally played God by being-for-my-self.

Campaign in poetry. Govern in prose.

It's been a while since I could use a mechanical can opener with any physical dexterity at all, so I went and bought me an electric can opener. They had cheaper ones for sell, but I figured the extra five bucks might have some advantage I didn't understand, and from the looks of it, I didn't. When I got home I plugged it in and tapped the handle a couple of times to see what happened, but I didn't actually open a can with it to see how it worked. It sat there for a month or so.

One day, like today, I was making some chili and had three or four cans of tomatos and beans and kernel corn to open, and I remembered to give it a try. Mind you, it's been right there in plain sight, and if it had been a snake... etc. I'm just slow on the uptake with some new technology. I positioned the can inside the groove when I thought it went, and pushed down on the handle to give 'er a whirl.

To the nakid eye it didn't seem like it was doing anything at all. The can spun round and round, but I didn't see where the can was getting opened. I put my hand under the can and lifted the handle to see what the matter was, and I got the surprise of my life. The whole top of the can came off. This can opener didn't open the can from the top, it opened cans from the side just below the rim. Neatest cut on a can I'd ever seen. I may have decided to make chili tonight just to get to use the can opener.

Pearl Diving and LISP

The statement "as above, so below" has come into prominence in my attention span recently. I watched some videos suggested by Bob English and one of the themes of the videos was how early man attempted to repeat the images he discerned as special in the skies above him on to the ground below his feet. Some of the patterns are featured in a wild book called Chariots of Fire.

The strange thing was that these patterns could only be seen from up in the air. It was only upon the invention of airplanes that they could be seen from above and with the advent of satellite photography they can be viewed at leisure. They are facsimiles of specific constellations in the sky. I don't know exactly what this has to do with the computer programming language named LISP, but that's what I started out to write about.

I don't know anything about LISP except what I've read about it online. I took a truncated, futile community college business course on BASIC, but what I learned there didn't amount to much. I guess it gave me a better insight into computer programming than no exposure at all, but what clued me in about what might happen with me and a proposed avocation of programming revealed itself in the way I didn't have the enthusiasm or dedication to surmount the learning curve like I do when I actually accomplish something. LISP is said to be the choice programming language for schizophrenics. To them it's heaven on Earth.

If I'm really interested in a subject I'll seek it out at every opportunity, and although a lot of the subjects I possess some expertise in might impress a rank amateur, my supposed skill is ostensively clumsy and entrenched with the angst of the self-taught. I consider myself lucky when some true expert decides for compassion and doesn't expose me for the fraud I am is. I picked up a book or two on LISP, and read articles about people who favor it, but I never followed through.

My favorite metaphor for this huge difference in technique between the learned and the self-taught is the primitive oil paintings of Grandma Moses as compared to the wild passion of Vincent Van Gogh or to the schooled fine art of Rembrant. It's not that they don't hang side-by-side with comparable worth. Sometimes, its the sheer arrogance of the self-taught that causes me to take a second look of pure joy.

It might be tedious to say for true that people create the image they model their life and even their looks after, previous to doing it or whether it's a simultaneous, serendipitous uttering of the word that self-assembles as if according to some unknowable master plan. A woman whose attitude I admire wrote something to the effect that such creativity is and must proceed unintentionally.

I conjure the image of a non-physical sort of pearl suspended in your psyche. If you can't boot it up, then just lie to yo'self and pretend you can anyway. Imagine this pearl as something that is alive. It has volition, curiosity, and an odd me-more of it's own relationship with the me and thus of ti-me or it-me or it-me, ergo, the id. 

This possibly imaginary alive entity can look like a pearl because it's center is a nothingness/void from which emerges these separate radiations of pure light that only extend from the vacuity of it's nothingness out just so far, and they stop at a specified distance from what would be a common center. Collectively, all these extended end points of radiation give off the soft, luminescent glow reminiscent of a real oyster pearl. 

However this pearl-like entity is described, the point I'm trying to make is that what is important is that it is the goal of the hero's journey. Sometime referred to as the golden Queen's table or by the more adventurous, Circe. 

My experience with this pearl derives from being on the outside of it looking in toward it. Somehow, I circumnavigated it merely by focusing on the emptiness of it's imaginary center. In and around the outside of this pearl were all the possibilities of the universe. I KNOW!! LOL It's a paradox. I'm describing the id, but it's normally considered to be contained. It's counter-intuitive to consider the fullness of the id being outside of an empty anything. 

Maybe the deal is that from outside the pearl you can perceive everything as anything inside the pearl. But from inside the pearl everything is nothing but the sa-me thing. There is no everything or anything or even nothing. It's the sa-me without the slightest hint there might be more to it than what it is. It is.

The woman who writes like a priest talks (she forces me to listen to what she writes as I read it) about women representing the inside of all things and the unconscious mind. The thing of it is that while circumnavigating the perimeter of the pearl I would suddenly get pulled inside of it in the blink of an eye, and from the inside of this pearl-like living entity, I be-co-me-d omniscient due to the fact that outwardly the exterior of the pearl can only be viewed omnidirectionally in instantiation. Nothingness is merely the result of a lack of a point of view in time. Nothingness ain't got legs. '-)

I Wasn't There When She Died

I had to drive to Fayetteville to go the VA Hospital there in order get some blood work done before my appointment with my regular doctor on June 2nd. The idea is that the laboratory will have all the testing done and ready for her consideration before the appointment. The VA doctors believe in a lotta blood tests. It's become a little bit of a problem lately because I'm receiving treatment at two different VA hospitals, and they don't appear to have computer privileges with each others databases.

I don't mind each hospital taking blood samples for whatever they need them for. It's not enough blood to threaten my life, and I kinda like the idea of my body having to make new blood. Maybe blood gets worn out. Sorta. Taking so much blood from my veins has gotta remove a small amount of stuff like heavy metals that have no other way to get outta there each time they poke a needle in me. If I knew how to donate blood I'd do it. I suspect it's good for you. Or not. Who knows?

Needles seemed to have become the bane of my father's existence in his latter years. Every time they would take him to the hospital and leave him alone, he'd rip the IVs out of his arms, and it was always a bloody mess. He really became a child again before he died of "the old folk's friend" pneumonia. It has an even more sobering effect on me now to remember it than it did then.

The writing I do is about the only other activity besides eating and sleeping I engage in that isn't tainted so much by my health problems, but the amount of time I'm hunched over a keyboard is not the only time I drift about in the dream time.

It's been written that the death of a man's father can mark the most significant change of attitude and behavior he'll ever engender. I was nearly an old man myself when my own father died at the age of 88 in 1995. Our relationship had been loud, constantly argumentative, and one-sidedly violent. I was bigger than him by the time I was fifteen, but I never hit him back. Despite that, the changes his expected death wrought came softly, and they took a long time to clarify. 

Since then, I've become more like my father in some ways. My mother literally became him for eight years after his death until she died too. My father's relatively painless death of old age was the death of a newborn. Not a wrinkle in his brow. On the other hand, my mother's death mask looked remarkably like The Scream. Ain't that just like a woman? She was probably railing like a banshee against the dying of the light. 

Another Man's Shoes

I live alone to keep from continuously falling in love with people. One of the most treacherous difficulties I never conquered was that I couldn't shut it down and promise exclusivity with any one person no matter how much intellectual understanding i gained from the humiliation of trying to be faithful.

I could be faithful physically, but I couldn't not fall in love with what I saw of myself in other people. Turns out... that's all I could/can see, and I'm convinced for whatever reasons, that who-we-think-we-are is all any homo sapiens can perceive when they engage the unconscious pretend world they created themselves, with adopted rules of conscience that they absolutely did not create themselves.

I'm convinced there is a species flaw in the way homo sapiens ideate or create ideas. I tried to blame it on Sartre, but I've been re-reading Being and Nothingness, and I'm beginning to think it's my own invention rather than Sartre's. It's not really my invention as much as a subjective discovery of the existence of a universal principle, that not only has always been around, but is part and parcel of what created the homo sapiens species via evolution itself. I haven't given up though, I may find somebody else to blame this preposterous theory on before the fat lady sings.

Why would I not? I know this dynamic like the bruised, wrinkled back of my hand. The idea of this species flaw arrived like some special poems I wrote in the past. This idea of a species flaw came outta the blue as a contradiction to the message it bore. It was already a done deal before I wrote it down. I didn't create it or invent it. I discovered it fully formed, and wrote it down as an afterthought. The species flaw, in my highly disregardable opinion, is that no member of the species homo sapiens can realize it's own possibilities in real time. So, there you have it. Life is what it ain't, and it ain't what it is.

This is not some universal truth that should be written in stone. It's just some drifting thought I captured with words. It's not my possession. I don't own it. It's not limited to the space/time continuum physical life and it's sensory modalities occupies. Like a lotta other drifting thoughts, it's just out there for the taking by anybody playing around with what Joseph Campbell called the hero's journey into the dreamtime.

The hero's journey is how the species flaw can be surpassed extemporaneously, but not for all ti-me. Just until you croak. Croaking is passing beyond being a homo sapiens and your body starts rotting, so if being homo sapiens comes with a species-wide flaw, then croaking takes care of that with a no-hands-down policy of ostensibly abandoning the baggage.

"Thanks for the memories." was the comedian Bob Hope's sign-off song. It brings up the question of what gets abandoned as baggage when humans croak, and what don't. The opposite end of that spectrum might be about whether one has to croak in order to abandon the same baggage. I'm referencing what I wrote recently about how the species flaw is superseded by gnosis. The species flaw is about how not knowing one's own possibilities (in real time) casts a pall about "What to do?" In some cases, it seems that resolving that confusing state of unknowing becomes more important than confronting wot's actually sot before us to be reckoned with in the immediate present.

"Thanks for the memories..." relates to how I've described the three attributes of what I call the pearl. Volition, curiosity, and memory. Realizing the memory aspect was the latest clarification of my own trinity layout and completes it. That's what my remembering vision was derived from. The faculty for memory that was a part of the original package. During that vision, the collective content of that primitive initial memory system was revealed to me in a spectacular individuating way that completes me as a whole being, and makes all of me available to address a focused point of inquiry without distraction.

A good friend and I have had a running conversation about a state of being called Asperger's Syndrome. He's a lot more educated about the particulars of this naymed thing than I am is. It's about autism, and presently autism is the source of my curiosity. I ignore the world for extended periods of time and participate in simultaneous extensions of what life is for me here, but in a time that's distorted from time as it's observed here. I figure the fact that I can enter this state or not according the the dictates of my curiosity and volition is what allows me to walk around like it's okay for me to be this way. If there is anything value-added to the soul by having evolved to being human it's gonna be filed in this primitive memory system that we brought with us and will take with us when we croak.

This is weird stuff to describe. In just the last six months or so I've questioned whether what I've been describing as a simile with an oyster pearl is not more like what I've heard "black holes" described as. I heard on the news this morning in regard to the upcoming Hubble space telescope repairs, that it was through photos taken from the Hubble satellite that it was discovered that there is a huge black hole in the center of every galaxy. If we consider our bodies a sort of galaxy, then it makes sense that there is a black hole in each of us that holds our bodies together just like a huge black hole holds together a huge galaxy.

I can explain why I get drifty, seem spaced-out, and withdrawn into my own sphere of consciousness for long periods of Earth time fairly easy. At least to Americans who have been driving automobiles since from their teen years. There is no more to what I do when I withdraw from my body's ambient surrounding, than what happens when I occasionally lose track of time driving on a long trip. I get where I'm going without incident alright, but then I don't remember nothing about how I got there. It's the strangest feeling. I used to do that on welding jobs working lots of overtime on industrial shutdowns where all the work had to be done in a specified amount of time anywhere from two weeks to two months. We worked. We ate. We slept. We worked. I have performed at a journeyman's level welding pipe that was x-rayed when I finished the weld for three months, and never remember any of the people who worked the same job ever again. It truly insulted them, and could be very embarrassing. Sometimes they never speak to me again. Ever.

This is what happens. I get focused on something I'm not just witnessing, but participating in, and some significant other takes the notion that I'm deliberately ignoring them, so they create an intervention that rudely dissembles my focus, but they're wrong. I'm not ignoring them. They don't ex-is to me in that state of being.

When I give up hope they ever will, even though I know they can, then why would I continue to indulge their selfishness when they contemptuously drag me outta my focused insight as if by my feet, when my head is in the clouds. I expect them to gnow. In the blink of an eye I can ex-is in both dimensions and often do. They can ex-is in both dimensions and often do. Why is it that I'm being selfish for going their without them if all they gotta do is be-co-me?

If you were dust
on the side of the road
in warm and sultry weather?
I'd be a cloud and rain for you,
and we'd be mud together.

~ Manassas

I make up the stuff I write here as I go along. I don't know what the truth is. It's ongoing I think, and I know it passes into history in a very short amount of time. When the specious present passes into the history books, what it carries with it is no longer the truth, if it ever was. Even the truth can appear plausible without being convincing. On odd days, I feel like a PR agent who puts a spin on what could be or once was the God's own truth, but the result ain't got legs in real time when I try to walk a mile in it.

Pisces And Universal Karma

She is not the only woman
who has scarred me up for life,
But, she is the only woman
who has done it with a knife.
I volunteered. I signed my name.
It couldn't have been abuse,
Upon my usual search for blame
I've found nary a single excuse.
All fall down.

~ fmp 5/9/09

I wrote the various paragraphs below to a member of the Thomas group this morning, and I'm publishing it here. That's because who I want to read it isn't there. At least I don't think they are, but I am certainly is:

"I'm looking at the ties-that-bind as being that of the Father and the 
Sun (son). In my opinion the father represents the past and the son 
represents the future. Literally. The son/Sun comes into being in Aries as the 
father/Saturn passes away in Libra, everyday, and it's probably blasphemy of some kind to screw with the process, but 
not undoable. Daylight Savings Time, for example.



"because of their indwelling dispassion and sentience." = rest and 
movement.



Blasphemy? It may be disrespectful to speak ill of the dead, but we do 
it here on the discussion list all the ti-me, and then curse the dead man's dead enemies to 
boot. What's done is done, and what's not done, yet, holds no mirror 
for blasphemy to look upon with askance.



I-am-is only has the specious present of continuous, ongoing atonement 
to satisfy it's urge to life, and if It looks back to Sodom (past/ 
rectum) or looks forward to Gomorrah (future/mouth), It turns into a 
pillar of salt and preys dolefully for rain. Whatta drag, man."

The Absolutions Of Pollux

You came my way
and thought you'd go,
but i saw yo' mind
and knew you'd gnow,
if I told you
the very truth
about myself
which is aloof
from worldly things.

I am a light
from very far
that gleams
with all the beauty
which we worship
in a star,
and is in day
the very night,
the shadow of
a very bright
daydream.

I'm here to show you
through the night,
and take you to
another light
that gleams alone
throughout the years
to give you hope
instead of fears
of dying.

And, when I quit
you'll want to cry.
You'll bow yo' head,
and wonder "Why?"
you spent yo' time
to sit and sigh,
While I was here
to satisfy...
yo' need for lying.

July, 1973
Edited: Today

You Can't Forget What You Never Had To Learn

I downloaded FoxFire again, and went through the motions of changing over from Safari, but I'm just not that unhappy with Safari, and besides, FoxFire still wouldn't do what I'd downloaded it to do. It still wouldn't let me register with the Free Dictionary because I use a Mac. I'm a little sad that I can't use it as a home page because they have useful features like word of the day, and other artsy craftsy features for people who like to write.

I like what I find included on the results page when I type in a word to ask for a definition. You don't have to be registered to use the site's features. But, you can't post to or see the results on their forums if you're not registered. What a drag, man. With each inquiry there is a extended history of each term that I find interesting. But, apparently they only let Windows users register to participate. The BBC site was like that for a long time. It appears as if I'm forced to take my spinning beach ball and go home, but it's not because I wanted to.

When I booted up Safari again to check on what I'd published here most recently, I saw that I didn't post what I wrote yesterday and the day before. I've had a flow of visitors and I've been out of town more than usual, either that or plain lazy, and so I decided to do it today. I brought it up and looked it over again to spot any typos or obvious mistakes. I'm getting more and more blind and that's as much a reason why I make mistakes as much as for mis-editing. I literally don't "see" some mistakes because of poor eyesight. C'est la morte!

I don't have to wait any longer to explore in real time how getting older and older is affecting my mental wherewithal. I'm losing the need for information about how to conduct myself in the workaday world. That information is generally associated with academic endeavors too. Not having to kiss nobody's ass to get my Social Security check has eroded my sycophantic skills to a bare minimum. I think senility and entering one's second childhood might not be as gross unless losing the skills you don't need any more is a bad thing.

I participate with some other men who are as old or nearly as old as me, and it worries me that they seem to rely on what their education and fancy job titles have earned them, in the past. I could be wrong, but I see it as blasphemy of the spirit. I gotta reason for "seeing" it that way. It comes from a saying I've discussed with a large variety of people on the Thomas group:

44 Jesus said, "Whoever blasphemes against the Father will be forgiven, and whoever blasphemes against the son will be forgiven, but whoever blasphemes against the holy spirit will not be forgiven, either on earth or in heaven."

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

This saying seems strident in pointing out that blaspheming the wholy spirit carries a heavy price tag. So, how can one know when they're blaspheming the spirit, as opposed to blaspheming the Father or the Sun? It moves. The spirit moves. The Father and the Son do not. Well... maybe. It works that way for me. YMMV.

A Day Late And A Dollar Short

Did you see the Nova show on PBS last night about how the Mayan language was decoded one step at a time by a succession of individuals? With the final piece of the puzzle being resolved by a mere child? It was a kind of "feel good" piece in that there are still Mayans around who speak some of the language their ancestors were using back in the day. 

The very idea that these researchers could figure out how modern Mayans could learn to read their own history without interlopers with hidden agendas is the feel good part. My immediate impression is that for a Mayan individual who learns to read the original carvings and statuary they could become as if Mayan priests. They know the secrets of the ancients, or at least they could make that claim. Who would tell them "No." 

I guess I'll never know how this might turn out since I ain't immortal, but it's an interesting development that allows rampant speculation by reflecting on what might happen to the Mayans now. 

That program last night made me think of Gnostics. I'm speculating that there won't no sech thang as a Gnostic in the same sense that there were and still are Mayans. For the Mayans, their history is literally written in stone. That's probably the only reason they still got it. The so-called Gnostic Library discovered in Egypt in 1945 is not the history of a people like the stone temples and carvings and statues and jewelry of the Mayans are. The sayings and stories associated with the "gnostics" are not a matter of history at all, as much as they are a guide to how not to repeat history and thus be doomed to what never worked then either. 

Reagan's speech writers had him saying one specific and very lonely statement that I agree with. He said, and I paraphrase, "Anybody can become an American no matter what part of the world they come here from." The history of America is really about immigration from it's roots to it's core. In my opinion it can also be said, "Anybody can become a gnostic despite what they were raised to believe." All they have to do is to experience gnosis and it's so, no matter how they get there. 

In my opinion, experiencing gnosis is the crowning achievement of individuation. Experiencing it by any means literally implies that you have your own identity, no matter what. Unfortunately, it also means you're typecast, and limited in the roles you can play with some degree of believability. The range and scope of how much star power an individual has often depends on how many different types of roles they can play, and when possessing enough is enow.