Copacetica

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The strange symbol above is just a placeholder. I just don't like the way the first line of my blog entry is jammed up against the title header, and so I've started using these quaint symbols that come from the character palette to create space. This palette appeared on the top menu bar with an American flag as it's icon. The most frequently used of these symbols I use is the degree (º°˚) symbol. Having that character palette available for all applications is neat. It's tedious to write about astrology without the degree symbol handy.

The AppleScript e-mail discussion group has been ranting about the way the new 64-bit operating system called Snow Leopard has changed the way dates are scripted. It doesn't seem to do any good to complain. The changes are to bring more global time systems into the scripting language. They gotta. The world is shrinking. Humans in general don't like change, but it has to happen to remove all doubts about what time it is anywhere in the world.

The argument is that in addition to the 12 hour system and the 24 hour system, the Arabic system and the Asian system are even different from that. It makes sense to have one world time. Particularly for conducting global business. It's curious to read the legal problems just these script developers have with the present dating systems. Nobody really had to worry about writing contracts that have global time factors involved until the digital evolution happened. Now, big money deals are made and time-stamped in milliseconds.

An enduring correspondent occasionally called Rich, mentioned his interest in composing classical music. I wrote back and told him my method for composing original music amounts to me combining mistakes I made playing other people's music, that sounds copacetic together. I have a definite sense of what sounds good to me, and although I might wish the world agreed with me I don't think they'll change, and if they actually did agree with me, then there would be no incentive to change or rise to meet the challenge of a competitor. In my dotage, I'm happy when I rise to any occasion.

I seem to need somebody to compete with to outdo my last best effort. Either that or somebody I think is just wonderful has to be there for me in order to show off TO, when I otherwise couldn't care less. Frankly, I am is the only-est One I gnow that can be that for me.

More and more I understand what Jung means by his description of religion:

"Religion is a defense against the experience of God." ~ C. G. Jung

http://www.minnesotareads.com/2009/04/the-power-of-myth/

I'm thinking he means the defense we mount to protect our experience of God. Which is, according to what I've read, the collective of our species experiences. I have experienced this in vision, and spent the rest of my life defending my sanity. Defending sanity is tantamount to defending what I experienced in vision, and the attempts of others to gainsay it.

I impressed myself by playing a little something that made sense with both hands late last night. I was practicing that 48 chord run I learned off the internet first with one hand, then the other, then both. I began playing little riffs I thought might work using the left hand to set the pace as bass, and just tinkling around with my right hand. It sounded okay until I forgot to change keys with my right hand.

These 48 chords all have the same pattern and there are only two notes to represent each chord. More notes in the same key can easily be added for fullness or not. Each chord is fashioned by maintaining the high note, and then moving the lower note by a half-step for each chord for four chords, then the top note is moved up a half-step and kept there while the lower note is moved a half-step down each for four sequential chords.

This is one of the more difficult types of writing I do. I don't know how... yet... to describe mundane things like practicing the piano to a non-musician who could be interested if I make it easy enough for them to go along for the ride. It might be that I'm limited to playing the kind of music on the piano that I can describe by writing about it. In other words, if I could describe playing the piano better I might play the piano better. In the same vein Rembrant stated that nobody can see any better than they can draw.

Getting up from my computer and walking out to the paved road to check my rural post office box seems like it would be simple enough to write about, but describing the mundane, ordinary aspects of a common human activity is more difficult for me to write about in such a way as to make it interesting for the reader to visualize themselves doing it as a possibly interesting way to look at life. It's a little like the observances made by some of the wilderness Buddhas. Even if you attain enlightenment and you live by yourself, you still have to chop wood and haul water. Well, you know, not literally. Not when you have an electric stove and piped in water.

There are two problems with writing about events in which I am is the sole observer. When I play the piano I work toward performing the rudiments on a daily basis such that I don't have to think about what I'm doing anymore. Not knowing what I'm doing makes it difficult to write about what I don't consciously in real-time know. It's easy for me to walk to the paved road (about 500 yards one-way) and back and be so absorbed in my abstract calculations I never notice one external event along the way in a manner designed for re-membering it later in lalaland.

A break from my intense point of focus is why I walk to the RFD post office box sometimes in the first place. To focus on something outside my own imagination for a change. It has to be deliberately done unless some spectacular event happens to immediately put me on guard against disaster. The most rewarding way for me to provide myself with diversion from my self-generated intensity is to stop and practice meditation. All it takes is to stop and consciously take a deep breath, and I'm here instead of there. There has to be a refuge intentionally created to go to in one breath. I'm self-taught, so naturally I think that's the best way, but I don't really. Avarice is my chief feature. Not exclusively, but undeniably there for to ponder.

It is not a disaster for people to think I'm crazy because I have visions and admit it openly just to provoke attack. I don't go quietly into that good night, but fight to defend my right to experience life that way without discrimination. It's not gonna happen. I will never be able to say what I've experienced without causing a negative reaction, but a man gotta do for himself as well as for-the-other.

I seem to be jumping into the abyss more often these days. Realizing my remembering vision amounted to the bestowal of gnosis through writing on the Thomas list has changed everything. I know that I have to rely on what I "get" from that "species memory" Jung wrote about as the collective unconscious. I experienced it first-hand, and nobody knows or can know but me.

Nobody will know whether I let the results I obtain from that cosmic source be my guide or not. Nobody will know what I've done to deserve the gold star I want for being a "good boy". Nobody will hand me a sticker to put on my hard hat that says, "Atta boy!" I am is the only one who gnows I know, and the only One to hold "me" to it.
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