The Om Chants

I believe we each create ourselves in our own image as if Gods. I can literally look out and modally perceive what the other has made themselves into for their own sake, But, if they attempt to explain why they made the choices to look the way they see themselves, I only hear what I think they're seeing. I only see what I hear them saying, as if I really consciously cognate a rose that is anything more than my idea of what a rose is, that is a rose like only I know for sure that roses are like. Who isn't selfish about how they smell roses?

It's warm enough today, barely, to leave the front door open and let my brother's dogs come in and out as they please. I don't think they're allowed to do that at his house without getting yelled at and maybe spanked, so when they come inside my house they do it very gingerly. They only stay for a little while as if they really were visiting, which they are. They not my dogs. I feed the the excess bacon grease from my frying pan occasionally. Especially if it's cold. Dry dog food ain't enough when it's cold. Some time I give each of them a strip of bacon if it stays cold too long. They look out for me too. They thing they own this place. "This land is my land. This land is your land. This land was made for me and you." ~ Woody

When they were puppies I recognized that I could stop them from following me home by screaming a C#6 at them, and they would tuck tail and run back under the shed where they were born. For the last couple of days I've been singing basso at them and patting them on their heads and backs in rhythm with the nursery rhyme I be singing. They get ever so jealous (anthropomorphically) of my ability to bark better than they do, and squirm their bottoms on the floor and howl at me. They try to bark like I'm singing. I would swear it's to impress me that they somehow understand what I'm doing.

Back when I kept a hatha yoga practice going on a daily basis for years at a time, it just seemed natural to sing a Hindu (maybe) chant Om ne padme Om. I thought that made me look slick with the green girls who frowned a lot and wore loose, slinky, see-through dresses. I used to remember the significance the creators attached to this om ne padme om chant. They seem to claim it's universal in the sense that it works no matter what your native language may be. It seems to work for me and I only have English.

I used chanting techniques daily for years and they really hoped me in the way it's claimed they will. There have been times when I have been so discombobulated by external events that the only thing that really worked toward leveling me out was to chant the same saying over and over until my frustration went away. Then, I might meditate. Chanting and singing both are ways of controlling the shape of the primeval scream. Pretty much like how wolves individually shape their own howling at the Moon, and loons screech to hear their calls echo over the waters.

In my opinion, humans use words for that. Words give humans ready-made shapes, tones, and tunings that can literally move mountains, and humans do. Sometime for no other reason than they can. Why would they not? Every life form needs some method for howling at the Moon. Isn't moving mountains by yodeling pretty much the same dynamic as a wolf howling at the Moon?

Chanting took a different turn after I began taking bel canto voice lessons sporadically in my twenties and thirties. I still do the Om chants most days, but I also do the warm-up exercises for that style of classical singing, and if I feel encouraged by how my voice warms up, I sing a good long time.

Fat Cats And Lead Hats

It isn't always up to each of us to either decide or act upon some uncontrollable situations. Call me eccentric (and solipsistic), please, but I think neutrinos have something to do with this. I know. I KNOW! It's an obsession. I've been told so many times even I believe it by now. But, I still think neutrinos have something to do with everything. Everything I tell you... Neutrinos Rule! LOL

I don't really know why. Personally, I just like the woid itself. N-e-u-t-r-i-n-o-s. I like it phonically and every other way. I'm a big fan! Whatta woe-to-the-Id (wo-id, word [one symbol short of being an entire 'world' in itself]) to make tossed word salad with!

Damn, that must have been a super-large solar flare recently. Neutrinos up the ying yang. Tossed word salad is about all I can reach for when the onslaught of neutrinos are busy changing and reframing the content of my entire body/brain by zipping right through me and the very ground/Earth I stand on non-stop. 

It's time to publish my disclaimer. I don't know the truth about anything. I select the words I write here up to satisfy an inner daemon that seems driven by a pre-reflective notion that the specious present waits for no man. The moving finger writes what it does and ricochets on down the road seeking only to keep it between the ditches during it's brief visit while celebrating some other dimension's holidays.

Have you ever been associated with nuclear power plants and all the lectures and safety classes that are forced upon the employees of all levels? They have a lot to say about what happens when the variously labeled "rays" go through your body. The bureaucrats who run these... these... machines... seem to insist thet you know why you can only accumulate so much damage to the cells in your body via that process before you gotta take a sabbatical from being there. Why? Because gamma rays act like neutrinos. The radiation acts like you ain't there when you really are. 

Sure, I know it's silly to use neutrinos as a metaphor for the messengers (me-singers) who carry the marching orders of the Sun that sends them here. The priggishly over-educated numerologists (devotees of Scientism) have made pompous claims that they have proved that solar flares are what make it so. Who am I to stop the Sun?

A lotta people over a long, long time have considered the Sun/Son their Father. Don't all father's evil-eyed stares (concocted to control their children's behavior in a glance) all have an odd, unfathomable glare to them that makes children shake in their galoshes? 

Is it not written that no man can gaze upon the face of God without being blinded by the light. It's like the behavior of tortured men brought forth in chains before their captor's master. Don't even dare to look up into IT'S face or IT might act like a junk yard dog and rip your throat out so that you can't even scream out the injustice of it all. 

Okay, that's more like the more ancient Gods. Heathen bastards! Modern Gods are nicer. You still get whacked, but you don't know why. How many times have you heard dying people in the media cry out in despair, "Why me, God? Why me... ?"

More and more people are considering buying themselves a lead hat to stop those neutrinos from causing so much entropy in their body. But, ya gotta think about it. The neutrinos not only go through your body as if it wasn't there, it also goes completely through the Earth as if the Earth wasn't here. What good would wearing a lead hat be?

Cancer is cell growth gone awry. The only hope a body has for replacing the cellular damage done by particles like neutrinos passing unobstructed through your body like x-rays or gamma rays is to heal the damage done by those sorts of interveners faster than they can tear your cells down. Fast cell growth is what cancer is. Life is controlled cell growth. If it doesn't happen fast enough to stave of the entropy of your closed system or it freaks out and grows cells faster than they can be accommodated, you end up quite dead. No blame. You knew you were taking a chance when you came here.

Coping With A Critical Shortage Of Sunlight

No matter what one's ambitions are, the one central issue that really matters with all goals is a person generally needs to get their story straight. Me more than most. If your brand of truth puts God on your side and you get a bunch of fan mail encouraging you to be even bolder, then that's another story. I wouldn't know about that. I don't know what God is any more than I know what the truth is. Sometime it seems like about any ol' truth is okay with me, because I don't know how to call the truth a liar. I'm attracted to Colbert's use of the term "truthiness". I'm easy. Just get close enough to some truthiness I can sort of agree with and I'll pretend to go along with you for the sake of moving on down the line.

I went to the cafe I go to a lot for lunch today. The only seat available was with this old man who prominently uses a walker and sets it out in the aisle where it gets in other customer's way. I'm trying to figure out if he does that deliberately. I'm getting nowhere with that. I've sat with him before. He drives over from a small town or village about twenty odd miles away to have breakfast on Sunday morning in this cafe in his Sunday's best. He's pretty spiffy. A goodly number of people speak to him and call him by name as they pass by the booth. I found myself a little envious of the attention he received. That's what you get for being a nice person. No blame. Next time. I'll be nicer next time, but I would say that, wouldn't I.

I understand the weird reasons I paint myself in a corner to isolate myself better now, but I haven't always acknowledged doing it for that reason. My acting that way has helped me deal with the world as I've created it with my priggish preferences. This trait has become more translucent and openly conscious to me for about a year now. I couldn't help noticing that I wasn't leaving the house as much as I was even a couple of years ago. I wasn't leaving that much even then.

This relatively new reclusive phase started about the time I began experiencing real and enduring pain in my joints from the arthritis. I became preoccupied with dealing with the pain. I kept expecting it to get better. I guess I was in denial that I had an incurable disease.

My last visit to the rheumatologist at the VA Hospital in Durham resulted in an upgrade on his initial diagnosis. He told me I have two kinds of osteoporosis instead of one along with the rheumatoid arthritis. This didn't bode well. He didn't cheer me up when he shrugged his shoulders and rudely pointed out:

"You'll be seventy soon, and stuff like this starts showing up around this time. You might as well get used to it. You're gonna be on this medicine that makes you extremely nauseated for the rest of your life." I could have done without the shrug.

The old man I was having breakfast with spoke with a ragged voice that sounded damaged in some way and he was difficult to understand. I remembered some of what he told me about himself from the other time I sat with him, and that helped me to figure out what he was talking about occasionally. If he got lost in what he attempted to tell me, then what I remembered helped me to ask him leading questions to get him back on track.

The dank chill in the Spring air brings back other memories of waiting for the weather to warm up and stay that way. I've been through lots of false Springs. Enough to not get my hopes up that barefoot weather comes and stays at this time of the year. It's gonna be cool and edgy this way for the entire seven-day forecast. Not really warm, but nearly freezing at night. It's warmer in Chicago for Pete's sake. At least the sun has come back out to stay a while.

I didn't think about the psychological affect of persistently cloudy gray days like the Northeast part of the country is famous for. I only became aware of it at all when it was talked about on the TV weather reports so much. I was intrigued when it was announced that people up in that area bought special house lights that simulated sunlight to fight off depression that apparently accompanies such dreary weather.

I still don't know a lot about the technical details of how that sort of depression happens. I do know after that I began to notice peripherally when there were a succession of cloudy gray days wherever I lived. I formed a conscious habit of paying attention to how a lack of sunlight affected me. Along with what I'm learning about vitamin D and how the production of it in one's skin can be important, I've became quasi-convinced there is something to what happens if you don't get enough sunlight. It's pretty much like the effect of the length of the days getting shorter and shorter after the summer solstice.

The lack of available sunlight, whether it's because clouds get in the sun's way or because the daylight hours get shorter due to the season, is the specific reason political and religious leaders have traditionally created a lot of holidays in the Fall months to ward off the holiday blues inflicted because of the days getting shorter. They have been doing it for as long as there has been a recorded history. Damned clever of them, don't ya think? The homo sapiens species is the best one we've created yet.

After New Year's it's a long dry spell of no holidays until Easter. Holidays are not needed because the daylight hours increase day by day. There is hope in the air. People began taking off some of their winter clothes and expose a lot more sexy skin. That alone is enough to entertain even restless natives. Holidays? Who needs them. Life's a beach...

Burying The Past Before It's Dead

What I did to impress my father that I was following in his footsteps didn't work out so well. I became the kind of person he wanted to help, but he didn't want his own son to be one of the ones he saved from what had been in store for him.

I just wrote about the Magazine Street Mission story in an e-mail I just composed. The frequency that it comes up in my writing implies that it has an extraordinary place of importance in my dream time.

I wrote about how I sat in the front corner pew of the Mission's rude chapel so I could watch the faces of the other bums and drunks seeking refuge from a night on the streets of New Orleans. The religious service we had to attend was the price of admission for an inside place to be. The cops in New Orleans were scarier than the crooks. That was then. I can't imagine anything has changed because of the hurricane. Why would it?

What impressed me about the descriptions I conjured for the e-mail response this morning was that what I saw when I looked back to watch those bewildered faces made me wanna find a way to communicate with them in a language they would listen to with some interest.

Learning what it would take to reframe my lexicon to one that might penetrate the effects of chronic fatigue seemed like an original challenge to me, but in reflection it may have been what my father intended all along. Maybe he tricked me with misdirection. Maybe not. He's been dead for well over a decade now. I can't ask him. I doubt he would offer me a digestible answer in any case.

My father's mission may have been the direct result of America's Civil War. Maybe even one of America's wars before even that. The story I'm most familiar with (and a lotta these hand-me-down stories haven't panned out) is that the reason my father's ancestors lived in the Alabama/Mississippi area down near Mobile was that the land they developed into a cotton plantation was a federal land grant given to veterans of this earlier war as a reward for their service to the country.

My father had a habit of telling a story about how some of the significant others in or about his natal family had a habit of referring to his obsession to formally educate himself with a condescending label of "Poor Bill". He was the first and only child in his family (he was the youngest) who completed the seventh grade, much less get a college degree. In other words, they thought he had gone bonkers to do without and sacrifice to get a head.

My father's fondest wish for me, before he turned to my younger brothers to satisfy his thoughts and aims, was that I would get a head too. It pissed him off to no end for me to attempt to convince him that I was born with a head, and since such was a fait accompli his ambitions for me were not appealing. He never forgave me. Considering what I became to defy him, I don't blame him. It is only important to me that I forgive him. I don't know how I would gnow if I had.

One of the habits or rituals I'd definitely have to work on is forgiving him for bringing his job home with him, and continuing to treat me as his student rather than his own son when school hours were over. He punished me by holding me up to the standards his best students achieved, and used his students to render most of the punishment. I was extremely jealous of the time my father spent with his favorite students.

His favorite students were carbon copies of Poor Bill. He believed in them the way he was himself ignored. He made up for what was missing in their life by providing himself as a model for his students to emulate as a replacement for their own fathers, who were Poor Bill's too.

After the Civil War came the cotton bollweevils, and then the Great Depression. There were real reasons why the economy of the Southeastern U.S. was in shambles. My father's grandfather died after he returned from fighting in the Civil War only to die of chronic fatigue and shell-shock. The ravages of the reconstruction years were deep and personal in every Southern family. They lost the war, and most of the working aged men who know how to make a living. Only the Southern woman carried the day.

There were a lotta men around when my father immigrated here specifically to teach agriculture who had not been raised by a progressive culture whose social activities were organized by beneficent leaders. They were killed or despoiled by the aftermath of man-made and natural disasters or they just left the South for greener pastures because it was such a sad place to be. The Southern states didn't get federal funds alloted like it was to most states until World War Two came and passed, even though they paid as much taxes as they could. War might be Hell, but losing a war is even more hellish.

For the most part my father's efforts to replace the inured Poor Bills were applauded by the real fathers and the community in general too. He had grassroots power for trying to make the brighter children of the poor farmers and even poorer tenant farmers and sometimes rich farmers better men than they could themselves.

It was the State of North Carolina that was responsible for bringing in professional help to get their agrarian economic engine in better working condition. They hired at least forty college graduate agriculture teachers from Mississippi alone, and a lot more from other states.

The farmers in North Carolina were so beat down by what happened to their economic system that they were reduced to just copying the behaviors of the wealthier farmers, and plowed when they plowed, planted when they planted, and harvested when the rich folk harvested too. The rebellious ones followed the Almanacs and planted by the cycles of the Moon.

the personality of my father couldn't have walked into a more auspicious situation. Even according to him it was love at first sight. The State really backed up their decision to educate it's farmers so they could lift themselves up by their own bootstraps by adopting an aggressive system for paving the farm roads to help them bring their farm products to the market. My father was living a dream. He didn't have much time for me except when he couldn't find somebody to fill up with his missionary zeal for bettering the world. By the time I was a teenager I wasn't listening anymore, and that cut him to the quick.

It saddens me to no end that my own children will not be able to sit down at their computers when they get old like me and write about their experiences with their father when they were young. I wasn't there. I left my first wife and child when my first child was a baby, and my second-wife left me when our two girls were only three and five years old. They know the people they work with better than they do their own father. Why would they not resent me every time they see their friends hug their father? They're barely curious about me now, as if an afterthought they soon ignore. No blame.

If I live long enough (and since it's written that the good die young, why would I not), then the time will come when I won't know who anybody is anymore. Both my mother and my father didn't rightly know precisely who me or my siblings were for years before they finally croaked. We took care of them anyway.

For me, if I live long enough, all the people who encounter me will not only be strangers to me because I'm demented, they really will be strangers who can't possibly know whether I was any particular kind of person at all. I'm only praying I can finally learn to get off sexually on pain. If that happens I'll know immediately because of the arthritis.

Careless Love

The more I write on the internet the more I realize that I don't have the right to write anything I like. It's not so much a freedom of speech issue as one of ethics. I would write that knowing full well I don't have a clue what "ethics" really amounts to. My best shot at having any would have been when I was being hypnotized into using hypnosis in an ethically responsible manner, and I always have, but only because i wuz hyp-no-tized! ;-)

I'm glad I was unknowingly hypnotized into using hypnosis in an ethical manner because I was being inducted into a professional association named the Ethical Hypnosis Association. I was being inducted into this professional group by it's founder and President, Doctor Milton Erickson, otherwise known (but not to me, yet) as Uncle Miltie.

Uncle Miltie came to the graduating ceremonies of the hypnosis school I had been attending. He handed out the Certificates of Completion to the graduates of Harry Aaron's Hypnosis School. Harry was teaching Ericksonian Hypnosis, so Uncle Miltie actually cared who learned it, because he flew all the way from Arizona to be there in New Jersey. We were each called to the front of the room where Doctor Erickson handed us our certificates and said something personal to each of the twenty-two brand new professionally recognized ethical hypnotists.

That "something personal" was loaded for bear. Uncle Miltie was famous for taking the shortest amount of time using the least number of words to change people's lives forever. Who knew? I didn't. Not until some twenty-odd years later when I became interested in a method called neurolinguistic programming. It was primarily based on the now deceased Milton Erickson's work. In that brief interchange with Doctor Erickson at the certificate ceremony at Harry Aaron's second-floor Hypnosis School, he gave me a valuable gift I'd need to live so irresponsibly some people wanna shoot me. It took a long time to realize that his unrequested gift to me was a sense of ethical behavior that's got legs and can travel light.

I don't feel as though I especially need to act ethically according to some pundit's well-intended advice. My duty is just to be aware that some people place a lotta value on ethics of unknowable cultures and customs, and for that reason alone I gotta watch out for people like that with the cautiousness of a person attempting to live a life of no blame. They're easy to spot. Either they're wearing a bow-tie or they're persistently hanging around looking goofy with someone who does. '-)

I enjoyed writing the paragraph below to this guy (he uses a guy's name) on this philosophy discussion list I subscribed to recently. I like the end part where I wrote about having to be a child to see this guy in his pompous, emperor-like ways, wore no clothes:

"I don't know what shelf you have decided to put yourself on. How could I? I only have the woids and expressions you write down to impress who- or whatever you sing to for your supper. Since I've never seen you with my eyes or heard you with my ears nor touched you or smelled you or tasted you, the only clues I have for grokking who-you-think-you-are is the way you appear to judge the other as if they were you instead of themselves. Even then, I have to interpret your judgments of the other (as if they were you), but if they're of the same ilk you appear to accuse them of being, only the child in me, Great Emperor, can see that you're nakid. '-)"

This guy didn't like what I wrote. He called me not-me-s (names) for writing it. He suggested I was not his sort of person and that he was never gonna communicate or recognize my solipsistic posts again. Oh God, another shunning. Personally, I don't know what the big fuss is about.

Candidly, I don't think this guy was ever gonna abide with me much from the gitgo. He appears to think I gotta be like he thinks I should be to be okay. I don't be culling for that so much, but life in general seems to. Maybe I'll pray for him (or not) later, but right now I'm curious about what I might have meant when I wrote about having to see through the other's pomposity with the eyes of a child. That actually seems do-able. Watching myself write that statement might indicate how close I need to keep my child's eyes near to me for use in capturing drifting thoughts. One of my more involved avocations.

What does this say about being able to "see" or "look" upon a multiplicity of events within my sensory scope with the soft eyes of a child to "see through" the accumulated true or false baggage of making believe? Meditate more? Stay closer to the fire? Listen to the softest inner voices? Is this done with the peripheral vision?

It's claimed by vision researchers on the internet somewhere, that homo sapiens can comprehend the least amount of useable sensory data for making sense of the purported "little" that it does comprehend. I seem convinced the data that is comprehended as visual content of the peripheral vision has been less filtered by what our caregivers force upon us in order to civilize us enough to live in the company of man. I suspect many of the images we encounter in the peripheral vision in full consciousness are from a very primitive aspect of homo sapiens that can't be ethically named and thus given life in our memories.

I'm attempting to say, in my opinion, that the raw data processed by the peripheral vision is probably pre-civilized stuff. The unfiltered stuff of the dreamtime, but it happens when we're awake with our eyes open. I don't mean to patronize, but the eyes have to be open for the peripheral vision to be operant, but I'm suggesting that the peripheral vision "sees" the same hypnogogic material seen in the unconscious sleep cycles at night. By the time this beta stage data passes through the mediation process of the adopted rules of conscience that happens before it's "seen" by the foveal vision, the rough edges have been smoothed or you'd re-act to the way of the world as if a feral animal that's most dangerous when it IS civilized. Talk about selling myself short! Damn! What a fool I've been...

That frightens me a little. Keeping my childish ways close to the surface of my personality might invite snide comments and attract muggers of all kinds to what they see as a weakness. the inner sense of the innocence of that which is most childish about me is that it might be more of a curse than a blessing, time-wise, I would have to devote a lot of attention to changing it's swaddling clothes in order to make being there a common practice.

The Uncreated

The temperature is supposed to get up into the mid-seventies (23-24 C) for the first time in a week or so. It's been cold and dank and cloudy for the last six days in a row. What a drag, man. The Sun is out in full force today, however, and I'm gonna take a long shower and lay around naked in the sun for a while just to luxuriate like a rich man.

I spent about two hours or so reading an article on the state of SSDs (Solid State Drives) at the Anandtech web site this morning:

http://www.anandtech.com/storage/showdoc.aspx?i=3531&p=1

The guy that runs this site is a fine writer in general, but he's one of the best explainers of technology for all levels of experience I'm aware of. When he sets out to inform you about some new technology, what he writes is probably gonna be your best shot at understanding it unless you're as close to the fire as he is. He wrote a previous review of SSDs that practically changed the whole industry because he found them grossly lacking, and he said so in no uncertain terms. Brave lad. He bit the hand that feeds him to get them to do right. One of them did, and it made all the SSD manufacturers better for it.

I read the first article and found it very useful. This new article on SSDs is very timely. He openly admits that the Intel SSDs are as good as it gets, and although the improvements the other SSD manufacturers have made increased Intel's competitors marketability, Intel SSDs still rule the roost. They're more expensive, but for the superior performance thay offer Anandtech appears to think it's worth it.

Having to pay that huge penalty for my pipe springing a leak has dampened my excitement about the possibility of installing an SSD in my Mac Mini. I read where I'd have to upgrade my Operating System to do it anyway. The hard drive is the biggest bottleneck in the Mac Mini, and even one of the cheaper SSDs would change everything including the slow graphics. Shuttling data between a slow 5400 RPM hard drive and the motherboard graphics chips would change dramatically. I'll just have to sacrifice some other diversions that give me a little pleasure. How much I spend for food is about the only place I could watch my pennies. I'm overweight anyway.

I'm thinking more about memory systems lately. I've read somewhere the Koran was created by professional memorizers who listened to Mohammed's sermons, and then recited them to professional scribes. Islam seems like it''s based on these professional's capitalism. Why would it not be? Everything else is... or will be.

I'm pretty sure I'm not the only person who is convinced that a person who has a highly developed long-term memory can make a middling living from remembering stuff that other people don't know how to preserve. Many of the systems of expertise some people practice amounts to the systematic way they employ memory pegs or hooks to associate with any event they wanna remember.

The constellations of stars can be used as pegs for remembering things. They're famous for being in the same place for long periods of time. This really is a complex way of remembering things. The learning curve can be daunting. Just look up into the heavens on a crisp cold winter night when the stars seem so close you can reach out and touch them. The appearance of them are so random that you can pick out any part of the sky canopy and find an assemblage of stars that look like the Little Dipper. Just keep looking in the same direction for a while with the intent of locating the Little Dipper where you're looking, and your mind will assemble what's there into what you're filtering for.

After you have memorized some of the Major Constellations you have to memorize the myths, stories, and metaphors associated with specific groups of stars. Some of which may be only recognizable by your mentor. Why not? Any group of stars can be used symbolically by anybody who decides what they want them to mean. It's the epitome of me-and-thee-ing.

There are natural holy spots on Earth that are holy spots because they have distinctive features that can serve as memory hooks. Mountains are particularly useful because normally they stay the shape they are for a long time. I used to have reason to drive to Drexel, North Carolina just off of I-40. On a clear day I could tell how close I was to Drexel by a small mountain called High Peak. It was located on the other side of I-40 from Drexel and served as a landmark. A holy place is usually loaded with landmarks for using as hooks to associate specific memories with.

Mount Rushmore is like that, but what makes it a holy spot is partly man-made. I've been there a couple of times. Mount Rushmore wouldn't attract much attention without the faces of four Presidents sculpted on it. Now, the sculptures make the surrounding mountains landmarks of a Mount Rushmore visit, and it's a dandy wholy spot. Bow-tied conservatives worshiping patriotism. '-)

Temples and museums and huge libraries are deliberately built with their own distinctive features for the specific purpose of be-co-me-ing a holy spot. People who commit the distinctive features of a certain edifice to memory for the purpose of using it's features and statuary as memory hooks are said to be "of that temple", just as college graduates are said to be of that university. The Greek temples had teachers like Plato and Socrates hanging around the stoas and porches. They lectured alright, but one of their main jobs was to help their students memorize every feature of that temple. I'm guessing it was actually the only lessons they needed to become professional memorizers to serve the tops. If they learned to read and write and work numbers, they were even more useful, and sometime exalted.

The printing press was probably responsible for graven images taking over the mental direction of homo sapiens. With a memory system like that of astrology or temples (as above, so below) in place, learning the various systems of graven images should be easier at every turn.

There is another source to consider than systems of expertise. That's a system without a learning curve. A pre-existing system that can only be brought into consciousness by being revealed for what it is. It is in place even before you are born and will be there when you die, after the learned systems will be dust unto dust long before you realize you never needed them.

What Does One Thing Have To Do With The Other

I'm still trying to describe gnosis as a remembering. I wrote a new description of some sort on this new discussion list that lets me write there. It seems like many of the people who post on this philosophy discussion list approach philosophy from an academic angle, and that means something different to me than it does to them, and vice versa.

I approach philosophy as a progression from poetry and they seek proofs through mathematics. I don't care if what I write is right or wrong (I don't have time to judge if I wanna stay in flow). Many of the other members seem pedantically obsessed with producing pure thought and truthiness from their own perspective. No blame. I don't know if they understand my sense of humor, but they haven't kicked me off the list yet.

I'm playing around with the idea that what a lot of people need to satisfy their urges is to get emotionally met by remembering all of themselves like what happened to me. One facet of the way this thing has matriculated is that I don't remember doing anything any differently than I regularly did as the onset of the vision.

If what i describe causes some person to remember that something similar happened to them it might really surprise me. I haven't kept what happened a secret. I've described it to lots of people lots of times. I've read about what happened to me happening to other people. A couple of times by a living writer I might could have had a conversation with.

The one person who appeared to find my remembering vision plausible committed suicide. I didn't find out about it for years. Maybe I didn't wanna know, but I forgot that I could have easily found out by Googling it up. He was a famous person. The news of his death by any means had to have been national news. He may have been dead for ten years before I found out. Unfortunately, that's not new for me at all.

I don't consider myself to be an idealist, but my father was. He preached idealism and having "high ideals". Maybe I've become my father in my dotage without realizing it, but it certainly don't feel like it to me. My mother didn't leave his side for the last ten years of his life. I'm certainly not like my father in that regard. It's looking more and more like my own prophecy will come true.

I've lived alone for the last twenty odd years, and I'll die alone like a dog in a ditch. Candidly, becoming the kind of man my father was on my deathbed is not a very realistic possibility. I've lived long enough after his death to view him more like an ordinary person instead of the way I perceived him as my father. I don't think he really asked for the troubles my birth brought him.

It was only after I read Elaine Pagels' book The Gnostic Gospels:

http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/shows/religion/story/pagels.html

and then joined an e-mail discussion group did I realize that my remembering vision was what these people were calling gnosis. I had thought of it more to do with Kundalini. This realization took thirty years to get to.

My realizing that this strange vision I had just after my first Saturn Return was gnosis started opening all sorts of doors for me. But, the most important thing I realized in recognizing what gnosis is, is that is is not something learned, but remembered. That was the keystone of my understanding something huge. Well, huge for me. Your milage may vary.

The real trick for me after realizing that I'd been made whole thirty years ago without realizing the remembering visions implications is to remember to realize I'm perceiving what's sot before me with a huge increase in insight. But, that insight can be used only for making sense out of what I "see".

I had the vision first, and then the realization of it's true value much, much later. I didn't realize that poem was prophecy until just now, but it doesn't surprise me. Many of the poems that fell in my lap after the remembering vision have been prophetic, but nobody knows. Why would they?