Dying And A Murderous Desire To Be Left Allone

The physical pain I experience from the rheumatoid arthritis is real and 24/7. Obviously, if I'm asleep then I'm not conscious of the pain, but when I wake up at the end of each 90 minute sleep cycle it's ghoulishly waiting for me. If I have to urinate, then this interlude between sleep cycles is when I'm going to become aware of bladder discomfort also. When I swing my legs over the side of the bed to get up, all the pain memores pop back into consciousness, but taking care of business in the bathroom seems to go okay until I crawl back into bed and go to pull the covers back over my body to warm back up after peeing.

Writing, for the most part, is about the only activity that allows me to let go of my body enough to make time fly. As I've noted continuously I don't care if what I'm writing is considered to be true or false. That's not up to me, but to my reader. Yes, if you're reading this, then you're my reader. For the period of time you attempt to cogitate this tossed word salad I own you. So does any other writer you read, and if we don't own you it's not your fault when you go looking for another temporary top to take your attention away from you for a while. Writing makes time fly for writers just as reading makes time fly for readers. Some people are both. All writers read what they wright. Playwrights not withstanding.

I drove to Wilmington to get out of the environment that seemed to have me trapped in it's conventions, and the change of scenery seemed to do what I've always relied upon it to do. I use self-conversations as a ritual to segue from one set and setting of catastrophe to the next. I have read where some Asian cultures consider self-conversations to be an enemy to rid oneself of, but I disagree. If I had been raised in a culture that supported those particular rules of conscience, then resorting to them for comfort might be used to change my mood toward some sort of righteousness, but that's not the case. I was raised most poignantly in the Southern United States in what's commonly referred to (for good reasons) as the "Bible Belt".

If I am in pain, discomfort, and dis-ease, and I wanna reach for something familiar as a way to concoct an attitude that will make me feel better, I have to reach for what's already there for me as raw materials. My subjective experiential database of past experiences. The very source of where I get the materials I use to accuse other people of my own self-generated "problems".

I gotta accuse other people of being who-I-think-I-am-is or I'd never find out which rules of conscience I adopted to become like the people who "have it made". When I meet or hear about somebody who has it made I try to put myself in the position of witnessing how they do what they do, and start imitating who-I-think-they-are. Why would I not? It's why I majored in Drama and Speech in college, and it's how I eventually became a homo sapiens after arriving on the planet Earth (fairly late in the ga-me) as a teeny tiny black hole and immediately began drawing stardust within my event horizon to make something out of nothing. It wasn't my idea. I just imitated the other teeny tiny black holes that arrived before me and did what they were doing.

Do not for a moment think I don't know how crazy this seems to many people, but for everything one group of people think I'm nuts for believing, there's an equal number of people who wanna put me on a pedestal for exhibiting the very same trait. Double-bind. Damned if I do; damned if I don't. There's no exclusivity to go along with this condition. I'm willing to believe there are not many exceptions to the rule, and if there are, I'm apparently not worthy enow to gnow.

Me-And-Thee-ing For Love

I have a reason for using this hyphenated expression to indicate a simile with "meaning". It's because truth can only happen between me and thee in real ti-me and nothing more. I'm thinking even to say only WHEN you and I are face to face. Just as soon as we look away from each other what WAS truth is instead mere history.

I just hate this. God help me when I think of those ti-me-s I've betrayed the truth that ex-is-ted between thee and me. It's how I've become a shamed man. A man of constant sorrow. I'm forever guilty of turning away from the truth that extemporaneously excludes the world of being-for-the-other to see you look at me as if your prey. I loved being your prey. When you consume me I grow back with fresh eyes, the better to eat you with my dear.

The situation with the pipe that got eaten by a pine tree root system had me in a dither. I just gave them the money without a fight. I won't fight city hall. It's not to die for. It's only money. They'll make more.

I decided to drive down to the ocean and back to give myself a chance to allow new scenery to give me fresh ideas. Hopefully something i could obsess on for a little while to get my mind off the way the fox got into the hen house.

The completion of Interstate 40 to the Atlantic Ocean port city of Wilmington has really provided me with something new to look at. I've been making that trip frequently for over sixty years. It's only an hour away. I haven't gone there much in the last few years. I-40 has changed everything. The capitalists have arrived and turned it into a shopping mecca larger than I had ever imagined.

Oddly enough, the one commercial enterprise that impressed me was a CostCo store across from the Corning campus where I worked a few months. I helped fit pipe to build a large addition to make fiber optic cables.

Hordes of people occupy both sides of US 17 along the beach north of Wilmington. Expensive places. Luxurious places. Places that lure hurricanes to come and show them who is boss. Nobody cares. They'll build more.

It's a little dangerous for me to be alone so much. I get so used to having my own way that having to adjust to the rights of others can catch me off-guard. It's not dangerous to anybody else. I just get grouchy and act nutty, but people are more likely to try to calm me compassionately than to react in fear. They seem to know I'm no threat to them better than I do.

I had a difficult time yesterday calming myself down from having to write that check for so much money. I live pretty close to the bone. I figure sometimes I need a little reminder that I'm not dead yet, and that for as long as I live I have to take care of my personal affairs for as long as I can or somebody will take care of them for me, and whether I like the way they're doing that or not.

One of my most profound and humiliating experiences was to see my father trussed up in a straight jacket because he wouldn't stop running around the hospital hallways nakid as a jaybird. He was in his second childhood and thought doing that would make the grown-ups laugh like they did when he really was a toddler. He had no idea he was 87 years old.

I walked into his hospital room at the county hospital where his home nurse had sent him for some reason, and there he was looking like the saddest little version me I'd ever seen reflected. The nurse told me what happened and that he could either behave or stay in the strait jacket. I felt so helpless because I knew that if I forced the issue to take the strait jacket off him he wouldn't get the treatment he was there for.

My memory of that occasion prevented me from unknown results I might have gotten when I was in a hospital for a back operation. I was all doped up and walking around with the wheeled cart that carried the bottles for my IVs, and when I looked out the hospital's windows and saw the neon lights of downtown I decided that I'd like to go to a cafe and sit down to a good cup of coffee. When i explained this to the nurse they called for a big strong orderly to watch me and keep me from leaving the hospital premises.

That's when i remembered my father in the strait jacket. I changed my tune immediately, explained myself, apologized for not thinking straight about my situation, went back to my room, and the orderly went away.

The Internet As World Mind

If people who can't do, teach; then what is it that philosophy teachers can't do?

Maybe they can't be-co-me oracles. If they can't respond to oracular questions ala the Sphinx, then they can't have the privacy of the desert to themselves. I don't remember what the penalty was for not answering the Sphinx' riddle, but there was a price to pay for wasting it's ti-me with trivialities.

I continue to be amazed that all I really have to do about wot's sot before me is to know the exact question to ask, and to be patient enough for the correct response to sink in to the person occupying the warm body that answered the call.

The average person you might meet walking down a street full of pedestrians don't realize they can be used as an oracle by anybody who knows how. It's even harder for them to realize they already have been, and/or were before they could stop themselves from saying the first thang that popped into they mind. Becoming an oracle for a complete stranger in the immediacy of now just ain't what most people expect to happen on a day to day walk in the park.

It's a little ridiculous of me to expect people who don't even know what an oracle is other than what they've read about that used to be so in some ancient past. Why would they not. How could the very idea of oracles enchant those who don't know what they are or do?

I consulted the Wilhelm/Baynes translation of the I Ching daily or almost daily for over thirty years until I was told by my inner voice to stop doing that. It was only after I managed to stop using the written copy of the I Ching as an oracle that I realized that being stopped from using the book was the only way I could have realized I was supposed to ask my unending questions of real people. I hate to say it, but any warm body will do including my own.

I've already removed myself from the presence of others to some large, lingering degree that has even me worried a little. Using other people as oracles for a body of understanding they can't possibly see themselves as a container for is a lot like using an internet search engine like Google or Yahoo. Why would they compare themselves to such a digital portal as Google or Yahoo?

Unless a comparison of that sort was brought to their attention by an external source, they would never consciously know such a thing is possible. Once a person has been online for a while it's easy to understand how to use Google. When to use it takes a little longer. I had to be reminded by my youngest brother countless times to take my incessant questions to the internet and leave him alone. That was his way of habituating me to using a search engine to answer my own questions.

It shocks me a little to realize that the questions I usually want answered are not all that unusual. When I go to type in the subject or topic I want answers to, the drop down menu already has it listed as a common inquiry. I honestly thought I was a bit more complex than that. Granted, many of the questions I use Google for are questions of some doubt that I ever did actually know the real answer to.

Google is the old person's friend. It provides me with the commonly used words and descriptions I lose from the tip of my tongue. If I'm sitting at my computer I can use natural language questions or a list of associative words to "remember" what wasn't there for me just moments ago.

The internet as one huge world-wide database is still not large enough of a container to hold the evolutionary experiences of one person, and yet each person in the world contains a complete experiential database of everything they've ever made themselves into from the ti-me they arrived on planet Earth. That's talking about something very, very small. How small is truly moot. There doesn't seem to be an end to it. The people on that quest appear to be making it up as they go along, and creating smaller and smaller stuff to base their claim to fame on.

Burning Bushes

The new discussion groups I subscribed to aren't working out like I had hoped. I just unsubbed from one of them. I concluded it was the internet version of the Jerry Springer Show. Lots of name-calling and screaming in capital letters. The other one is a philosophy group, and oddly enow it has a lotta name-calling on it too. It seems filled to the brim with academic types that act like they're still trying to get good grades in some college course. Either that or teaching a college course. I've asked a couple of questions, but except for once I've been ignored. No blame.

I thought my last question was a good one. I asked this one guy why he concluded that the information the brain uses was only inside the brain. I was thinking about high powered electrical transmission line that radiate a magnetic field. The content of the copper wire is not just inside the wire but causes that magnetic field that surrounds it. I knew that my question might cause the guy to think I was going esoteric on him, and I was, but they were talking about brains as computers and how electricity affects mental processes. It wouldn't surprise me if whoever runs this group finds my offerings less than acceptable and kicks me out.

I seem to be moving to the point where that kind of thing doesn't matter too much to me anymore. The news that I'm gonna be taking methotrexate for the rest of my life seems to be the culprit. I've worked outside practically all day. I've been burning off the dried grass on my lawn and in the edge of the woods around my house. I've been burning in small patches because the wind has been up.

This work is a continuation of when I cleaned out some of the underbrush between my house and the pond when the sun sets over it most of the year. The two tornados that tore down the forest around my house left the woods around my house in a mess. It blew down or broke most of the forty year old yellow pines my father planted. I haven't really been out there trying to clean up so much. I was very disheartened by the loss of such a beautiful bunch of woods. They made my house look unique despite the fact that it's a rat hole. With the big trees gone, it's just a rat hole.

I've been working recently on the the north side of my house between here and the paved road. I'm about 150 yards back off the road, and the woods and underbrush and briar patches had taken over. The big fallen logs have all about rotted now, and I was able to take my axe and bust them up a lot easier than I thought. That's about the only way I can get them to dry out from the winter rains so they would burn. Soon enow, I'll be able to just take a little walk out into the woods and not have to fight off the briars and other entanglements. I might even plant a little fancy shrubbery and a flower plant or two. The rosemary bush I bought during the winter at a good price is gonna love the place I picked out specially for it.

The Me-and-thee-ing Of Vocation

This is a very odd site that sends out strange pictures. I can't read the language so I don't know where it's located. It's set up on RSS on my machine, but it should work just fine if you dial into it the regular way:

feed://halbot.haluze.sk/rss.php

I subscribed to a couple of e-mail discussion groups that seem to be about philosophy. One of them approved me quick, and I'm still waiting on the other. I chose groups that seemed active by the number of posts over the last few months. Some of the groups I checked out had lots of subscribers, but very few posts. One of them supposedly had 33,000 subscribers and only five or six posts for the whole month. The ones I subscribed to had consistent numbers over a long period of time.

I like reading e-mails from an active group if it's a subject I'm interested in. I get ideas to write about here in my blog from the discussion groups. I'm thinking I gotta get away from religion groups where lots of infighting occurs. Certainly more than meets my fancy. I feel like I've gotten to where I wanted to go with religion. I seem to be able to defend my religious view against all comers. So, why bother?

I read somewhere once that the Druids had ranks among their wandering priests with the highest being that of philosopher. The one under that was poet. I think it's kind of natural to matriculate from poetry to philosophy. Things get too big to be held in the container of poetry. Not only am I trying to expand my poetry into prose, I am trying to decode it and remember why I hid it away in nebulously connected words and phrases in the first place.

Wanting be more transparent demands that I make my abstract notions lucid. Lucid to me for the first part. A lot of the stuff I encounter in the dream time feels right, but I find it difficult to put into words that can be keened by the sensory dimension. In my remembering vision, ninety-odd percent of the experiential material doesn't and never did associate with words or even an integrated language of any sort. You gotta be an animal with some sort of brain for that.

The particular vision I had that revealed all the forms of life that I'd ever made myself into as a pearl of great price is a great challenge to put into words because they were never entered as sensory data. Many of the first forms of life I created via imitation of other pearls didn't have any sensory preceptors like eyes and ears. Tactile associations were about the best feedback from an external input source was about all they could hope for. Are all sensory preceptors made from skin?

I do seek to capture drifting thoughts like it states in the header at the top of the blog. I'm sort of convinced the "drifting thoughts" I seek to capture with words are me-mores from the other forms of life I created through mimicry.

To say that I attempt to capture drifting thoughts with words is a way of stating my intent for writing what I write here. The source for these drifting thoughts might seem a little unusual for those who hold no truck for visionary processes. If that's the case, why are you wasting your time? I'm not going to come around to your way of ideating. I like being stuck right where I am is.

One of the ways these kinds of memores attract my attention is by literally seeing something like an animal I made myself into by imitating other pearls who were imitating other pearls ad infinitum. Whatever us pearls/curls do, we do it in harmony. If we start evolving a grazing animal suitable for a specific set and setting we all do it by imitating the other pearls around us.

Not all the pearls are within the necessary proximity to see what all the other pearls are busy making themselves into. It might be the sa-me species, but there's gonna be a lotta variation on theme according to where you are in the pearl crowd and which pearls you're imitating. the ones on the outside of the core group won't get all the nuances of the main chance.

The people of a more conventional persuasion ain't gwine listen to no cockamamy ideas like this nor should they. I figure you gotta have a calling, and that resolves to you being one of those pearls yo'self. If your ground of being ain't that, then you might as well go read James Joyce to amuse yourself.

I read this description of what a "vocation" is written by Carl Jung:

To have vocation means in the original sense to be addressed by a voice ... whereupon they are at once differentiated from the others and feel themselves confronted by a problem that the others do not know about... - C.G. Jung

What is it, in the end, that induces a man to go his own way and to rise out of unconscious identity with the mass as out of a swathing mist? Not necessity, for necessity comes to many, and they all take refuge in convention. Not moral decision, for nine times out of ten we decide for convention likewise. What is it, then, that inexorably tips the scales in favour of the extraordinary? It is what is commonly called vocation: an irrational factor that destines a man to emancipate himself from the herd and from its well-worn paths. True personality is always a vocation and puts its trust in it as in God ... But vocation acts like a law of God from which there is no escape ... He must obey his own law, as if it wee a daemon whispering to him of new and wonderful paths. Anyone with a vocation hears the voice of the inner man: he is called. - C.G. Jung

http://koti.mbnet.fi/amoira/jungvoc1.htm

Actually, there are two separate quotes both on the same page at the site I linked. They sort of need to go together to get the complete idea, but there is another quote from the Gospel of Thomas needed to circle the wagons:

82 Jesus said, "Whoever is near me is near the fire, and whoever is far from me is far from the kingdom."

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

I once saw a definition for "vocation" that opposed it to "avocation". A vocation can be concerned with how close one is to the voice that provides them with their calling. If the voice is heard as being nearby the vocation can be as strong a calling as that of an obsession. Terse, forceful. Whereas an "avocation" is a calling from a voice that's far away and commonly referred to as behavior like a hobby. It's a matter of how close you are to the voice that initiates the calling. Voca/vocal.

I figure the Gospel of Thomas saying (#82) is pretty much the same metaphor, but it's compared to a fire instead of a voice. There are a number of sayings in the Gospel of Thomas where the "Jesus said:"is about fire. Why would it not? Jesus, like Baal, was a sun God.

My Mother's Religion

I kept my second appointment with the rheumatologist at the VA Hospital in Durham yesterday. It didn't take as long this time. He doubled the amount of calcium + vitamin D he thinks I oughta be taking because of those broad spectrum vitamin D research projects that are just now producing viable results. He agreed that the problems I've had with dairy products probably came from me trying to get the calcium my bones needs from using dairy products as a source. The calcium pills I've been taking for months now get their calcium from coral and oyster shells instead.

This doctor told me he probably wouldn't be there for my next appointment. He served his apprenticeship at the VA and Duke Hospitals and is setting up for business in Fayetteville. He invited me to become his patient there. Fat chance of that on my income. I like his approach to medicine. I'd continue with him if I could afford it. I provoked him into telling me what I had guessed previously, I'm gonna be on methotrexate the rest of my life, which may not be that long because it lowers my immune system, and I could die of the common cold. Probably pneumonia like my father.

It's about time anyway. Four score and ten is enough to figure out what's going on upon the surface of this particular planet. Which addresses my real question: What if I don't die for a long time and the arthritis gets worse and worse? Talk about your twisted fate. My children will just love it. That is, until they realize they look a lot like me, from my mother's side. They don't know their genetic history, but it's not my fault or theirs either. I didn't leave them, and they didn't have a choice about leaving me. Too late now.

It was good to get outta town for a while. Durham is about a hundred miles away and Raleigh is between here and there. I left early to avoid being late for my appointment because of traffic, and coming home I didn't encounter much of the rush hour traffic. It only slowed to a crawl one time both ways which seems a little bit miraculous. We're getting hemmed in by the growing populations in both the Research Triangle and Wilmington. A lot of it has to do with the completion of InterState 40 down to the coast.

I seem to be attracting some opposition to what I write on the Gospel of Thomas e-mail group that I haven't encountered for a while. It's not unusual. Everybody else does too. It's been that way as long as I have been subscribed. People arguing their religion with other people arguing their religion. It's probably the same way on politically oriented e-mail discussion groups. I've never belonged to one of those. I don't even argue with myself about my political views. They're not really mine anyway. I didn't rebel against my parent's political views, only their religious views.

Actually, it's my mother's religious views I fought against. My father was fairly non-committal toward religion. He supported my mother's efforts to get us to go to Sunday School and church services, but many times he didn't go himself. They asked him to preach occasionally, but he wouldn't go up on the pulpit to do it. My father was a great orator. He ought to have been since that's basically what he taught in school. He thought getting young country boys to stand up in front of crowds of people and speak their piece was the best thing they could do for themselves. My brothers were very good at it. They still get asked to speak in front of the local men's groups more frequently than others.

I feel clumsy writing what I do on the Thomas group currently. I seem to have figured out my role in life mo' bettah than ever before. My remembering vision has taken on a deeper meaning to me, and made me whole. My opinion of what I'm supposed to do for the rest of my sorry life is to use this wholeness to look at my life and how the world is in a more complete way. I don't think gnosis can be taught, only revealed by forces beyond my control. The ex-Catholics appear to still think their priests and bishops can bestow gnosis. Why would they not? To each their own.

Experiencing gnosis is the only thing that matters for anybody I suspect, but it's not up to me to provide others with what's not mine to give. I've at least known that much for a long time. Being honest with the other about that really pisses people off, and it would be easy for me to pretend like I got the power to bestow gnosis, but it wouldn't be fair to myself nor profitable in a way I could enjoy.

Using Strangers As Oracles Or Other Living Thangs

I use total strangers as oracles just like I would use the Yellow Book as an oracle. Any warm body will do. I tempt people to oracular behavior by asking them personal questions. Using the I Ching for an insufferably long time as an oracle taught me how to ask questions of the heart. That's what seems to disgruntle the impostors who use other people's experiences as if their own. They hate my questions because the implications contained in the answers of those question's go beyond their ability to shut them out. They never ask questions of anybody themselves. Just give haughty advice based on stuff they read engraved on paper and parchment, and watch dumb-foundedly in the broadcast media.

At first, if I wrote down a question and the tossed the coins to get a randomly chosen response from the sixty-four Hexagrams, each with their own six lines, I'd sometime get a response for the real question I had on my mind rather than the one I was consciously deluding myself with. Eventually I learned to discern what my real question was before I approached the oracle out of a sense of personal pride. Finding out what I really wanted to know in order to resolve subjective issues could be embarrassing because it was often proverbially hidden on the tip of my tongue.

Many times I didn't know what the question would turn out to be until I wrote it down or semi-consciously uttered it as if some inept, distasteful afterthought. Such is not always resolved with a "Eureka!!" moment, but unnoticeably slipped into the past as a wasted opportunity. I bear shame. 

I studied hypnosis from when I was twenty-four years old. I didn't really know why I signed up for those first night classes. I went to many more classes and seminars over the coming years. As far as I was concerned my understanding of hypnosis was to be used as a tool for seducing potential sex partners. It didn't turn out that way. I wuz tricked into acquiring ethics and morals. The bane of my ex-is-tense. 

The thing about hypnotizing people is that the only way to ken what they're experiencing in their trance state was to observe how their body acted, how their eyes moved behind the lids, they way they shifted in their seats in response to my communication. That went on for years. I learned to read people's reactions to how I spoke to them. There was a lotta this going on with reading palms. There's a lotta this going on when I'm having coffee with friends. There's a lotta this going on when I-am-is hanging out in the atmosphere waiting for a poor it to play fool to it's mastery. 

I don't read cards any more. I don't draw up natal charts any more. I don't hold hands with complete strangers anymore. When I've painted myself in a corner or find myself treed by the Hounds of Baskerville, I ask people the unanswered questions they hold captive in their own hearts, as if they are their most precious, selfishly hoarded possession. This slight-of-mouth engulfs their attention so powerfully they usually don't know I've left the premises. 

Sometimes, there's just no polite way to do it with some worldly people because they're such worthy opponents. If they're so entrenched in their defense to protect their personal encounter with God, that they got no ears for hearing me out, I force myself to give it up and co-me ho-me to where my own heart is. There's no hurry. I'm probably not going anywhere. Swap for another young body, hopefully before this one gets too much of a pain, and keep on keeping on. There's always the next life for them or the ten thousandth lifetime after that. Shit happens. Things change.