Truth-Telling At It's Worst

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I don't know the answer to that yet, and if I were you (which I am is not), I wouldn't bet the farm speculating that I'm gonna keep on looking until I do. There has to be a question in my mind for me to institute a quest on your behalf. It appears to me that many people I've serendipitously known in passing do not associate the term "quest" with the expression "question", and the additional three letters makes the latter unrelated to the former.

I went to a lot of trouble to contact a man I knew as a boy to see how his life had turned out. When we finally did get in touch at a reunion (of the school neither one of us finished high school at), I realized that my memories of a supposed friendship between us was non-existent. I'm not even surprised any more to discover I've deluded myself.

The memory of his true careactor back then at that sad reunion returned when he openly stated, "I'm still the meanest little sonofabitch around.", and then, oddly or not, started talking about his love for Jesus. I knew his mother. She wasn't a bitch, but a real heroine, so he could be lying about Jesus too.

It's too bad that people have to hate their own father and mother (according to the Gospel of Thomas), and their own siblings in order to acquire their own true identity. Well, maybe not so much bad as unfortunate. Particularly when the family they must rebel against is held in high regard living in the community in which they rebel against them. I didn't understand this while it was happening.

I don't think many people do understand the needs of puberty while it's happening to them, nor later in contemplative reflection. One day I sort of "woke up" to the fact that there wasn't gonna be a future, soon enow, in which I could reflect on old age, and how it was changing me incrementally, inch by inch until I croak. One thing I'm fairly sure of is that once I do stop breathing for good, the personality I use for contemplation dissipates into the nothingness and unexperienced terror of the abyss. One must have a body to experience terror with or it's simply not… terror. '-)

70 Jesus said, "If you bring forth what is within you, what you have will save you. If you do not have that within you, what you do not have within you [will] kill you."

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

About the only mutable thing going on about me is the facets of life associated with the planets occupying the sign Pisces, and the fact that my Sun inhabits the Sixth House, the natural home of Virgo. The rest is all fixed signs with a smattering of Cardinal signs thrown in for the sake of a little spice.

I don't know what's going on with my attempt to learn how to use AppleScript. I reduced my e-mail intake to personal posts and the mail from this AppleScript discussion group. It's a fairly active group, and I promised myself I would read each post and at least try to follow the conversation as best I can. My "best" is not all that wonderful presently.

I stopped using the website where I got a 45-day trial run. Somewhere along the line in this quest (based on a true question, but of questionable sincerity) I read a comment in a passing blog site where the author wrote about his approach to learning AppleScript to the effect that he was reduced to just staring at some script until he finally understood how to construct a script of his own making.

This staring approach is probably the only real hope I have of acquiring even a rudimentary use of AppleScript. I stopped using the web site to work the definitive AppleScript tutorial written by Apple employees because the time limitation was a sword over my head. My initial purpose in signing up for the trial period at PeachPit Publishers (Thanks!) was to find out if my motivation was real, and to find out if I needed to buy the book.

Well… maybe, and not right now. This is one of the benefits or detriments of being subscribed to this Apple-Sponsored e-mail discussion group about AppleScript. The main discussion on the list for the last few weeks is about how the upgrade to Snow Leopard with it's 64-bit operating system has effected AppleScript.

Every time Apple upgrades their operating system, these days (AppleScript used to be HyperCard and hasn't been AppleScript forever) they have to upgrade AppleScript to accommodate the changes. Recently, no longer than a couple of days ago, some well-thought of Apple pundit publicly asked in a highly publicized article, Is AppleScript Dead?

It appears as though I decided to attempt to learn AppleScript at an iffy juncture for the language itself. Some of the members of this company sponsored discussion group are Apple employees who are directly associated with what actually happens to AppleScript. Other members of the group have published books and tutorials about AppleScript. They appear to my neophyte's eyes to subtly argue about what's gonna happen to AppleScript in the face of so much of a change in direction for Apple.

One of the known conscious reasons I had for studying and using the Wilhelm/Baynes translation of the Book of Changes (I Ching) was that it's stated purpose was to teach it's adherents the art of statecraft. I was an active student for over thirty years. I needed to learn statecraft.

People kept telling me, "Boy, you just ain't right. You don't know at all how to act around decent people, do you?" What part of my interaction with my accusers seemed rude? I was just a kid. I didn't know. I went to acting school. What else was there for me to do? I attempted to learn to distinguish when I'm acting and how to be believable in unfamiliar roles, but all I can know about you is whether you got talent or not.

Neither group of people in the AppleScript community appear to convince the other that what they know is well-informed. Oh, they say they got the skinny, but they're not very believable. Programming languages appear to change with the times or die from disuse anyway. The people who learned it one way hate change. Sound familiar?

Like the Horse head nebulae in outer space where stars are born, once formed, the stars can have explosive results or get eaten up by a bigger system by which they're reduced to catching-as-catch-can in order to survive. But only if they attempt to survive as what they haplessly arrived as in the new system. Change can be so subtle and so individualistic in it's way that it really has to be studied as a separate subject from the larger and smaller wholes that it affects.

This resolves to be-co-me-ing. At least, that's how I view the world these days. Shit happens. Things change. To keep up with the changes requires one to let go of the old way of doing things. If you do that, then a hard rain is gonna fall. Be-co-me-ing is easier, and once learned and experienced provides the spice that is the variety of life.

It's troublesome at times for me to accept irrefutably that there is only One me such as the first of the Ten Commandments suggests. I've deluded myself time and again by assuming that once I do allow that atonement to happen, from then on, any dualistic temptations should default to my initial submission to grace.

It doesn't appear possible to let go of all pretenses to the throne of individuality once and for all ti-me in order to be done with it. Letting go of myself as the first person singular is a constant that has to be reinvigorated from external sources each and every time it's evoked into being. At least, that's the way it is for I am. For better or worse I am is (presently) a double-Taurus whose stubbornness is frequently insurmountable.

Be-co-me-ing is all about movement and rest, in my highly disregardable opinion, and movement and rest is all there can be without at-one-ment of movement and rest. That suggests the presence of both simultaneously is do-able. Meditation? I act like that's so. But my current question to myself is: Does atonement eliminate or obviate Being?
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