❧
The statement I composed in my commentary below the Gospel of Thomas quote about "falling" could be an interesting reframe of what I experienced during my remembering vision.
***********
20 The disciples said to Jesus, "Tell us what Heaven's kingdom is like."
He said to them, It's like a mustard seed, the smallest of all seeds, but when it falls on prepared soil, it produces a large plant and becomes a shelter for birds of the sky.
http://users.misericordia.edu//davies/thomas/Trans.htm
[My comment on the quoted saying]
The only-est place anybody knows for certain where there is "prepared soil" and a "sky" that can "shelter" living entities like "birds" is the Earth. The "mustard seed" reference could be a red herring as far as logic goes, but to me it's the most interesting descriptor in the batch. It's fate depends on the s-oil it "falls" on.
☯
Previously, when I've used poetic license to describe a life-changing vision bestowed upon me just after my thirtieth birthday. It was an completely unexpected, impossible dream in which I re-experienced being every living creature I am had ever made itself into after being captured by the unknowable forces of the planet Earth.
Even though, in the past, I've stated that I was ecstatically bouncing around the universe of my own volition, and decided to indulge my curiosity of Earth as a "blue/green jewel". There is a chance I wasn't "flying through space" quite like I described in some of my previous attempts to manifest my vis-à-vis remembering vision.
During the period I composed my comment of the Gospel of Thomas quote and used the term "falling" in the way that I did, that caused me to wonder if perhaps "falling" might be a more appropriate descriptor for the telling of my remembering vision. So, that's what I'm trying to write about now.
Puzzled? Remember my disclaimer in the Header about not attempting to tell the God's own truth with my descriptions here, I'm just trying to capture drifting thoughts with words. Not to determine their worthiness, but to say wot I am is seeing.
Falling to Earth implies a lack of control as much as assertively flying boldly here signifies power over my circumstances. It weaves a different tale. It might explain my lack of an ability to fly outta here was due to the fact that I didn't fly here. Falling here might explain why I don't appear to be able to engender the will power needed for lift off.
If I did fall here instead of boldly flying in here like I am is the king of the world, then perhaps the only way off of this tour de force of nature is to fall off of it the same way I fell on it or upon it. If such is so, then I gotta somehow abandon the ballast Earth uses it's gravity to keep me here. As long as I value any physical attribute of being I'll probably be stuck here, but is that a bad thang?
A friend explained to me how some chemicals and pharmaceuticals can be absorbed directly through the skin. Steroids, for instance. He told me some people overdose on steroid creams and don't have a clue that's what is doing the trick.
I have some steroid cream that was prescribed to me a couple of years ago. My doctor told me it was good for whatever skin problems I might have, but she wasn't very specific about it. My friend told me it was definitely steroid and that it would help with the psoriasis that pops up on my toes. I applied some last night and by this morning the redness was almost gone. I guess I was being cautious without knowing I should be.
The weather forecast for this area is that it's gonna get cold tomorrow, and stay cold for the foreseeable future. They're not talking about unseasonably cold weather, but it's been warm for the most part lately. When it has chilled off temporarily it has warmed back up quickly. 'Tis the season... eh?
❦
I do not attempt to tell the God's own truth here because I don't know what the truth is or hardly ever. I try to capture the drifting thoughts that randomly appear in my imagination for reasons I may not understand. I don't know if the content I capture with these words is true or false. The Comments settings are turned off to prevent me from having to defend what amounts to little more than fanciful, sometime crude speculation. Great moments in our lives never return.
Tuesday, November 30, 2010
Monday, November 29, 2010
The Dead Past And A New Way Of Seeing
❧
The pain I've been experiencing in my back seems to be getting better. It may have been strained muscles from digging the trench I worked on to put the ethernet cable underground. The other problem I created myself by bluntly traumatizing my upper rib cage on the same side of my body trimming underbrush. That didn't help any. Between the two of them I experienced pain any way I turned, especially in bed when I rolled over.
It's not so easy to keep a positive attitude when my body hurts and my e-mail correspondents are publicly pointing out that I'm succumbing to the trials and tribulations of my dotage. Now I have "friends" who want me to clean their house and do their yard work for them. I'm feeling like Rodney Dangerfield.
My real fear in regard to my back trouble has been that it could be kidney problems. There are a lot of medical procedures that can't take place if you got bad kidneys, and the prospect of getting involved with kidney dialysis is not welcome. On the other hand, I'm perfectly aware that eventually I'll get sick of something and die. There is hardly a chance now I'll get killed by a jealous husband.
This coming Thursday I have an appointment with the eye surgeon who will remove the cataracts in my eyes. I'm not anticipating the surgery itself, but hopefully, the successful results thereof. In my opinion I am is better off for having watched all those YouTube videos that show the surgery I'll be getting eventually.
The fact that some sort of blood and gore doesn't come shooting out of the video patient's eyeball when the surgeon cut the outer layer to get to the cataracts was a relief. In several of the videos there wasn't even a trickle of blood that resulted from the cut. The eyes are not as delicate as I formerly thought.
An e-mail friend who has apparently had the surgery hoped for me that the VA allows the surgeon to use multifocal lenses. I've encountered the various types of lenses that can be used to replace the cataracts via the media, but I didn't have a keyword to do a web search in order to remove my ignorance.
Following his hint I Googled up "multifocal lenses" and that entire world was presented on the Results page with millions of hits. Cataracts are an age-old problem associated with the aging process in humans. Other animals too if they live long enough.
In a word, all the multifocal lenses have odd provisos attached to their insertion and use. My e-mail friend described one of them by writing that he will get a laser treatment they use to burn a hole in the translucent sac they replace the cataracts in. It doesn't seem to happen with the less expensive mono focal clear lenses very often, just the multifocal lenses.
The VA might be the same way about using multi focal lenses as the Medicaid policy cops to. They consider the clear mono lenses a medical necessity, but the multi focal lenses are thought of as a luxury item that are not necessary to good health, so if the surgeon puts in multi focal lenses, the patient has to pay the extra expense, and the cost puts most people off.
The temptation to spring for the multi focal lenses might be stronger if I were younger and was enticed with how not having to wear glasses might enhance my sexual appeal. Otherwise I might have a couple of choices about mono focal lenses.
The choice might be to have the mono lens in one eye set up for distance vision and the other eye have a mono lens set up for near vision. The articles I've read on the internet suggest this may be a good idea for people who have done this with contact lenses and find it easy to deal with. Some people do it with contact lens and it doesn't work well for them.
That can be a real problem to adopt this procedure and it turns out that doesn't work later on. Everything I'm reading strongly states that you don't wanna hafta do a replacement procedure unless its an emergency situation. In other words, the patient will have to live with what's done the first operation.
As far as I am is concerned, making up my mind about which procedure the surgeon uses before I even talk with him would be dumb and prohibitive toward getting the best service I can for me with this deal. In any case, I have to trust somebody to do this for me. I don't like having to trust people.
That's because my judgment is usually lousy because I get emotional, and I don't have deep enough pockets to pick and chose who I'll trust. So, I'll just have to wait until Thursday appointment, and see how it goes from there. It's a good omen, because I was born on a Thursday. Maybe I'll find a new life with my new bionic eyes.
❦
The pain I've been experiencing in my back seems to be getting better. It may have been strained muscles from digging the trench I worked on to put the ethernet cable underground. The other problem I created myself by bluntly traumatizing my upper rib cage on the same side of my body trimming underbrush. That didn't help any. Between the two of them I experienced pain any way I turned, especially in bed when I rolled over.
It's not so easy to keep a positive attitude when my body hurts and my e-mail correspondents are publicly pointing out that I'm succumbing to the trials and tribulations of my dotage. Now I have "friends" who want me to clean their house and do their yard work for them. I'm feeling like Rodney Dangerfield.
My real fear in regard to my back trouble has been that it could be kidney problems. There are a lot of medical procedures that can't take place if you got bad kidneys, and the prospect of getting involved with kidney dialysis is not welcome. On the other hand, I'm perfectly aware that eventually I'll get sick of something and die. There is hardly a chance now I'll get killed by a jealous husband.
This coming Thursday I have an appointment with the eye surgeon who will remove the cataracts in my eyes. I'm not anticipating the surgery itself, but hopefully, the successful results thereof. In my opinion I am is better off for having watched all those YouTube videos that show the surgery I'll be getting eventually.
The fact that some sort of blood and gore doesn't come shooting out of the video patient's eyeball when the surgeon cut the outer layer to get to the cataracts was a relief. In several of the videos there wasn't even a trickle of blood that resulted from the cut. The eyes are not as delicate as I formerly thought.
An e-mail friend who has apparently had the surgery hoped for me that the VA allows the surgeon to use multifocal lenses. I've encountered the various types of lenses that can be used to replace the cataracts via the media, but I didn't have a keyword to do a web search in order to remove my ignorance.
Following his hint I Googled up "multifocal lenses" and that entire world was presented on the Results page with millions of hits. Cataracts are an age-old problem associated with the aging process in humans. Other animals too if they live long enough.
In a word, all the multifocal lenses have odd provisos attached to their insertion and use. My e-mail friend described one of them by writing that he will get a laser treatment they use to burn a hole in the translucent sac they replace the cataracts in. It doesn't seem to happen with the less expensive mono focal clear lenses very often, just the multifocal lenses.
The VA might be the same way about using multi focal lenses as the Medicaid policy cops to. They consider the clear mono lenses a medical necessity, but the multi focal lenses are thought of as a luxury item that are not necessary to good health, so if the surgeon puts in multi focal lenses, the patient has to pay the extra expense, and the cost puts most people off.
The temptation to spring for the multi focal lenses might be stronger if I were younger and was enticed with how not having to wear glasses might enhance my sexual appeal. Otherwise I might have a couple of choices about mono focal lenses.
The choice might be to have the mono lens in one eye set up for distance vision and the other eye have a mono lens set up for near vision. The articles I've read on the internet suggest this may be a good idea for people who have done this with contact lenses and find it easy to deal with. Some people do it with contact lens and it doesn't work well for them.
That can be a real problem to adopt this procedure and it turns out that doesn't work later on. Everything I'm reading strongly states that you don't wanna hafta do a replacement procedure unless its an emergency situation. In other words, the patient will have to live with what's done the first operation.
As far as I am is concerned, making up my mind about which procedure the surgeon uses before I even talk with him would be dumb and prohibitive toward getting the best service I can for me with this deal. In any case, I have to trust somebody to do this for me. I don't like having to trust people.
That's because my judgment is usually lousy because I get emotional, and I don't have deep enough pockets to pick and chose who I'll trust. So, I'll just have to wait until Thursday appointment, and see how it goes from there. It's a good omen, because I was born on a Thursday. Maybe I'll find a new life with my new bionic eyes.
❦
Sunday, November 28, 2010
Who I Think I Am Is... Sorta
❧
The temperature dropped down to below freezing last night. I covered the one tomato plant I still have out in the open on my second-floor deck with an old blanket. I'm not sure it did that much good. I should try to move it over to my brother's green house, But, the ceramic pot is too much for me to handle in my present physical condition.
Its not all that apparent to me what the source of the pain I am is experiencing in my lower back. It's mostly on the right side. The powerful prescription drugs might have something to do with it. They might have damaged my kidneys since I'm still drinking more wine than I should.
There is a real good chance I strained some muscles when I was working to bury the network cable between my brother's house and my house. My lifestyle in the last few years has become more sedentary. Jumping into that much work with unlimited zeal may have been the main culprit.
This lower back pain has not been something I could just man up and ignore because I should be well-tempered and tough by this age. Manning up is probably what caused the problem. My brother was trying to help me get faster internet and I wanted to encourage his generosity with a show of enthusiasm.
I do a little yoga-like stretching and walk a couple of miles frequently. Most of the time I give myself a lotta wiggle room as far as beating my body up is concerned. Occasionally I get on my exercise machine and work up the rate of my heart and breathing. I'm always surprised how many repetitions I can do without suffering too much.
The actual flaw in my plan of doing hard physical work on the spur of the moment is that acting batshit crazy to impress my brother that I'm happy he wants me to have a better internet experience doesn't represent Right Thinking or any of the other venues of The Eightfold Path. I can't imagine Gautama would be pleased with my idiocy. Contrarily, however, this morning it seems to be a little better.
The fact that I'm making more mistakes in writing and especially editing is not lost on me. I seem prone to edit some sentence and repeat some connectors twice often enough. I type "that" instead of "than". My touch typing indicates how my mind flies ahead of my fingers. Sometime when I'm editing to try to catch this errata I do find it, but in consideration of how my mistakes are the subject of snotty condescension, I gotta assume there are times when I don't.
It has gotten to the point that I don't really care if anybody tries to struggle through all my "tossed word salad" or dumbass bombastic charade or not. The only goal I've ever had for writing a blog is to reach for a source that can "utter" some outrageous comments in the most elegant way. It doesn't happen all that much, but when it does it makes my clumsiness worth the slings and arrows.
This may be akin to what some people describe as "automatic writing" or "channeling" some otherly force, but I am is too practical to allow that sort of opinion to typecast my efforts. I have used every metaphor or parable or myth I became aware of to label this process to anchor it with some dignity, but my pedantic efforts have failed.
It has only been through retrospection that I've been able to notice any patterns to this "reaching" for the source I reference. Its very real to me. What I am is reaches for is the most permanent feature of my ex-is-tense. I arrogantly assert that it is definitely what I want to identity with as a human or as any other living form I've made myself into via imitation and mimicry.
My awkward, stumblebum attempt to capture drifting thoughts with words has occasionally allowed me to rub shoulders with this source I keep mentioning. I speculate wildly that this source is not the pearl/black hole itself I characterize sometime, but rather one of the three attributes this universal entity brought with it when it was attracted to Earth.
The three attributes I loosely claim the I-am-is brought with it to the planet Earth is curiosity, volition, and memory. It's the memory attribute I am is exploring as the source presently. In that sense it's the more of me than anyone else can perceive. It was the content of my remembering vision. It is the dream pouch for every event or universe this entity has participated in during the entirety of it's existense.
This information has to be extracted and interpreted using abstract ideas or they can't be manifested in the sensory dimension. The construction of abstract notions can be based on anything from anywhere for any reason. My subjective experience tells me the abstract constructions I feign to play Prince Chi to the world with all come from this one un-nay-me-able source.
It is my opinion that most of the holy books in the world make a similar statement in this regard. Basically, that if a human being identifies with this one source instead of all the temptations of the I am, then the "mind" of that specific human won't lose itself in the unending parade of living bodies it passes through without being duped.
If the "mind" part of the adage "Mind is speech. Speech is mind." is grounded in continuous denial that unwaveringly states, "You are not me.", then that mind will not taste death.
❦
The temperature dropped down to below freezing last night. I covered the one tomato plant I still have out in the open on my second-floor deck with an old blanket. I'm not sure it did that much good. I should try to move it over to my brother's green house, But, the ceramic pot is too much for me to handle in my present physical condition.
Its not all that apparent to me what the source of the pain I am is experiencing in my lower back. It's mostly on the right side. The powerful prescription drugs might have something to do with it. They might have damaged my kidneys since I'm still drinking more wine than I should.
There is a real good chance I strained some muscles when I was working to bury the network cable between my brother's house and my house. My lifestyle in the last few years has become more sedentary. Jumping into that much work with unlimited zeal may have been the main culprit.
This lower back pain has not been something I could just man up and ignore because I should be well-tempered and tough by this age. Manning up is probably what caused the problem. My brother was trying to help me get faster internet and I wanted to encourage his generosity with a show of enthusiasm.
I do a little yoga-like stretching and walk a couple of miles frequently. Most of the time I give myself a lotta wiggle room as far as beating my body up is concerned. Occasionally I get on my exercise machine and work up the rate of my heart and breathing. I'm always surprised how many repetitions I can do without suffering too much.
The actual flaw in my plan of doing hard physical work on the spur of the moment is that acting batshit crazy to impress my brother that I'm happy he wants me to have a better internet experience doesn't represent Right Thinking or any of the other venues of The Eightfold Path. I can't imagine Gautama would be pleased with my idiocy. Contrarily, however, this morning it seems to be a little better.
The fact that I'm making more mistakes in writing and especially editing is not lost on me. I seem prone to edit some sentence and repeat some connectors twice often enough. I type "that" instead of "than". My touch typing indicates how my mind flies ahead of my fingers. Sometime when I'm editing to try to catch this errata I do find it, but in consideration of how my mistakes are the subject of snotty condescension, I gotta assume there are times when I don't.
It has gotten to the point that I don't really care if anybody tries to struggle through all my "tossed word salad" or dumbass bombastic charade or not. The only goal I've ever had for writing a blog is to reach for a source that can "utter" some outrageous comments in the most elegant way. It doesn't happen all that much, but when it does it makes my clumsiness worth the slings and arrows.
This may be akin to what some people describe as "automatic writing" or "channeling" some otherly force, but I am is too practical to allow that sort of opinion to typecast my efforts. I have used every metaphor or parable or myth I became aware of to label this process to anchor it with some dignity, but my pedantic efforts have failed.
It has only been through retrospection that I've been able to notice any patterns to this "reaching" for the source I reference. Its very real to me. What I am is reaches for is the most permanent feature of my ex-is-tense. I arrogantly assert that it is definitely what I want to identity with as a human or as any other living form I've made myself into via imitation and mimicry.
My awkward, stumblebum attempt to capture drifting thoughts with words has occasionally allowed me to rub shoulders with this source I keep mentioning. I speculate wildly that this source is not the pearl/black hole itself I characterize sometime, but rather one of the three attributes this universal entity brought with it when it was attracted to Earth.
The three attributes I loosely claim the I-am-is brought with it to the planet Earth is curiosity, volition, and memory. It's the memory attribute I am is exploring as the source presently. In that sense it's the more of me than anyone else can perceive. It was the content of my remembering vision. It is the dream pouch for every event or universe this entity has participated in during the entirety of it's existense.
This information has to be extracted and interpreted using abstract ideas or they can't be manifested in the sensory dimension. The construction of abstract notions can be based on anything from anywhere for any reason. My subjective experience tells me the abstract constructions I feign to play Prince Chi to the world with all come from this one un-nay-me-able source.
It is my opinion that most of the holy books in the world make a similar statement in this regard. Basically, that if a human being identifies with this one source instead of all the temptations of the I am, then the "mind" of that specific human won't lose itself in the unending parade of living bodies it passes through without being duped.
If the "mind" part of the adage "Mind is speech. Speech is mind." is grounded in continuous denial that unwaveringly states, "You are not me.", then that mind will not taste death.
❦
Saturday, November 27, 2010
Dreamtime Sagas
❧
A continuing series of nightmares haunts me. I get trapped in these huge industrial complexes that are dim, somehow misty, and I keep going from one part of the place to another trying to find a way out. Dead ends. False exits. Even if I make it out to the parking lot and drive around all the exits are chained shut.
I once had a series of dreams like this that took place in a tropical setting whose architecture reminded me a lot of Key West, but it was more like the bayous down on the Gulf coast of Mississippi than an island. I'd get trapped in the upper floors of these wooden houses that had verandas. Outside porches that overlooked the live oak and palms trees lining the streets below. It was a very pleasant, laid-back oasis, but I couldn't get outside or even down to the street level to walk out into it.
My remembering vision was like that in the sense that in that vision I got attracted to the planet Earth while zooming through space free as a bird. Something attracted me here, and once I zoomed inside of Earth's gravity, or whatever, I couldn't leave, and so I started making a life for myself here creatively via imitation and mimicry using wot wuz sot before me in the immediacy of now.
The fantasy of my imprisonment is of my own doing or was. I used to think the power that keeps me here on this earthly space port was lust. I kept getting attracted to procreation of any sort, no matter what sort of creature I made myself into via imitation. That's what my remembering vision was all about. All the various creatures I'd made myself into. That is, until I made myself into a human, and I've been one of those ever since.
Some humans can make themselves abstractly into anything they've ever been (if they receive a vision of what has already been modeled and made real), so there is no reason to reach for a higher physical form to put my ancient experiential database to work as specialty tools for tapping into future possibilities. It seems like I have to cop a casual attitude in attempting new methods for the sake of appearances, as if that's not what I am is trying to do, but frenetically AM. The next step in evolution is not physical, but something built with the abstract mind of homo sapiens.
Am I writing that immortality is gained by visualizations? Such as the visualization exercises I've written about how wannabes visualizing statues of Hindu gods like Kali. Or, like devout Christians attempt to create a living representative of Jesus or the Christ? I think I am.
Will I be able to find the descriptors that will allow me to create an escape pod that will allow me to keep the creative parts of me with that abstract construction for the I-am-is and me to use in the next level of evolution? That I don't know, but I'm driven to take chances that might get me committed against my will.
Maybe that's why my nightmares have moved from being trapped in the upper floors of antebellum wooden houses to the greasy floors and huge machinery of industrial complexes. I ain't talking digital clean rooms in this scenario. That might be even more frightening. I am is not a neatnik. Moreover, what does my maternal grandmother have to do with this whole nightmare deal?
One dream I had a long time ago was about being in one of these old houses with gingerbread ornamentation surrounding the second-floor porches. Somehow, I knew it was my grandmother's house, yet at the same time I knew it wasn't the real house my grandmother lived in.
In the past, I was looking for her in old wooden houses. The one in my dream/vision was a fine house, it would have been considered a plantation house, a mansion perhaps in my grandmother's day. I went up to the third-floor that was a sort of attic, but had small bedrooms there instead of it being used for storage.
That is, all were bedrooms except for a hidden room only a nosy little boy would have ever discovered. That's how my grandmother considered me. The nosiest little boy she had ever known, and no matter how manner times she punished me I would keep on snooping around. That's apparently how I discovered this secret room in my grandmother's imaginary house.
Discovering the contents of this secret room was the thrill of a lifetime for a five year old boy. It was an Confederate arms cache left over from the War Between The States. There were lots of brand-new infantry rifles and shiny calvary swords galore. I was ever so happy. I had hit the jackpot! Then, as you might have already guessed, I woke up, and the house and everything in it, like the Grail Castle, disappeared. Poof!
It's a suspicion of mine that the results of this one rather fantastic dream kept me exploring old houses in my dreams until I reached middle age. I was no longer looking for my grandmother per se, but for her hidden treasure. I think I dreamed of the plantation houses until I started dreaming of the grimy industrial complexes.
The living memory of the very dream that started the industrial perspective comes to me now and again. I entered this grimy city on a bridge that crossed a river to get there, but the bridge sagged down into the river, and I had to wade across the sagging bridge while unsure of my footing as a act of faith, and once done, there was no going back. I realized that when I was wading across it, and I haven't dreamed much about old houses since.
Dreams are abstract creations that can be manipulated in the dream's real ti-me by gaining a lucid state that allows me to change the scene or fight the monsters, but not the content of my visions. I don't appear or seem to be able to change anything. My best response seems to be to kick back and witness. This may have to do with the sort of dreaming that only happens in the Delta state of my nightly sleep cycles.
Can I slip into that reality while dreaming and permanently leave my physical body behind to suffer it's own fate? I think it's possible, and is symbolically represented by that hidden room where the arms cache was stashed.
Discovering that secret place in the dreamtime with all the goodies a young boy lusts for of the tools that could possibly help him to defend himself against the giants was a big deal psychologically, but like other big deals I only experienced it once, an old, old, ancient ritual that I seem to have to rediscover with each new body I snatch from the living dead.
❦
A continuing series of nightmares haunts me. I get trapped in these huge industrial complexes that are dim, somehow misty, and I keep going from one part of the place to another trying to find a way out. Dead ends. False exits. Even if I make it out to the parking lot and drive around all the exits are chained shut.
I once had a series of dreams like this that took place in a tropical setting whose architecture reminded me a lot of Key West, but it was more like the bayous down on the Gulf coast of Mississippi than an island. I'd get trapped in the upper floors of these wooden houses that had verandas. Outside porches that overlooked the live oak and palms trees lining the streets below. It was a very pleasant, laid-back oasis, but I couldn't get outside or even down to the street level to walk out into it.
My remembering vision was like that in the sense that in that vision I got attracted to the planet Earth while zooming through space free as a bird. Something attracted me here, and once I zoomed inside of Earth's gravity, or whatever, I couldn't leave, and so I started making a life for myself here creatively via imitation and mimicry using wot wuz sot before me in the immediacy of now.
The fantasy of my imprisonment is of my own doing or was. I used to think the power that keeps me here on this earthly space port was lust. I kept getting attracted to procreation of any sort, no matter what sort of creature I made myself into via imitation. That's what my remembering vision was all about. All the various creatures I'd made myself into. That is, until I made myself into a human, and I've been one of those ever since.
Some humans can make themselves abstractly into anything they've ever been (if they receive a vision of what has already been modeled and made real), so there is no reason to reach for a higher physical form to put my ancient experiential database to work as specialty tools for tapping into future possibilities. It seems like I have to cop a casual attitude in attempting new methods for the sake of appearances, as if that's not what I am is trying to do, but frenetically AM. The next step in evolution is not physical, but something built with the abstract mind of homo sapiens.
Am I writing that immortality is gained by visualizations? Such as the visualization exercises I've written about how wannabes visualizing statues of Hindu gods like Kali. Or, like devout Christians attempt to create a living representative of Jesus or the Christ? I think I am.
Will I be able to find the descriptors that will allow me to create an escape pod that will allow me to keep the creative parts of me with that abstract construction for the I-am-is and me to use in the next level of evolution? That I don't know, but I'm driven to take chances that might get me committed against my will.
Maybe that's why my nightmares have moved from being trapped in the upper floors of antebellum wooden houses to the greasy floors and huge machinery of industrial complexes. I ain't talking digital clean rooms in this scenario. That might be even more frightening. I am is not a neatnik. Moreover, what does my maternal grandmother have to do with this whole nightmare deal?
One dream I had a long time ago was about being in one of these old houses with gingerbread ornamentation surrounding the second-floor porches. Somehow, I knew it was my grandmother's house, yet at the same time I knew it wasn't the real house my grandmother lived in.
In the past, I was looking for her in old wooden houses. The one in my dream/vision was a fine house, it would have been considered a plantation house, a mansion perhaps in my grandmother's day. I went up to the third-floor that was a sort of attic, but had small bedrooms there instead of it being used for storage.
That is, all were bedrooms except for a hidden room only a nosy little boy would have ever discovered. That's how my grandmother considered me. The nosiest little boy she had ever known, and no matter how manner times she punished me I would keep on snooping around. That's apparently how I discovered this secret room in my grandmother's imaginary house.
Discovering the contents of this secret room was the thrill of a lifetime for a five year old boy. It was an Confederate arms cache left over from the War Between The States. There were lots of brand-new infantry rifles and shiny calvary swords galore. I was ever so happy. I had hit the jackpot! Then, as you might have already guessed, I woke up, and the house and everything in it, like the Grail Castle, disappeared. Poof!
It's a suspicion of mine that the results of this one rather fantastic dream kept me exploring old houses in my dreams until I reached middle age. I was no longer looking for my grandmother per se, but for her hidden treasure. I think I dreamed of the plantation houses until I started dreaming of the grimy industrial complexes.
The living memory of the very dream that started the industrial perspective comes to me now and again. I entered this grimy city on a bridge that crossed a river to get there, but the bridge sagged down into the river, and I had to wade across the sagging bridge while unsure of my footing as a act of faith, and once done, there was no going back. I realized that when I was wading across it, and I haven't dreamed much about old houses since.
Dreams are abstract creations that can be manipulated in the dream's real ti-me by gaining a lucid state that allows me to change the scene or fight the monsters, but not the content of my visions. I don't appear or seem to be able to change anything. My best response seems to be to kick back and witness. This may have to do with the sort of dreaming that only happens in the Delta state of my nightly sleep cycles.
Can I slip into that reality while dreaming and permanently leave my physical body behind to suffer it's own fate? I think it's possible, and is symbolically represented by that hidden room where the arms cache was stashed.
Discovering that secret place in the dreamtime with all the goodies a young boy lusts for of the tools that could possibly help him to defend himself against the giants was a big deal psychologically, but like other big deals I only experienced it once, an old, old, ancient ritual that I seem to have to rediscover with each new body I snatch from the living dead.
❦
Friday, November 26, 2010
"Ah Hopes Mah Die They Do"
❧
For some, it seems, living life the way I do might be cruel, if they did what they think I do for their reasons. It's not easy to explain that I don't do what I do for their reasons. Any more than they do what they do for mine. In my world view it's not possible for either one or the other.
My youngest brother subscribes to one of those "word-a-day" dealios where the guy running the gig sends out a new word with the etymology and examples, and his opinion of the word of the day to boot. Infrequently he forwards a copy to me if he thinks I'll be interested in it.
A couple of days ago he forwarded the post in which the word-of-the-day was an expression rather than a single word. Maybe it's French or Latin or some other language. I don't care. It was "tu quoque". It means the subject/person is using another person as a sort of straw man to cause an attack on them for behavior they practice themselves.
Until my brother brought the tu quoque fallacy to my attention I have used the psychological descriptor "projection" to point out that a person is accusing some other person of acting or reacting to stimuli in the exact same way they would. Whether that behavior is treated by the observer as sinful or saintly is determined by how they would expect to be treated if they were "caught" performing the same act.
Observing that homo sapiens, as a species, have a tendency to ideate the notion that their fellow animals do what they do for the same reasons they would act that way, has been the ground of being for my irrefutable denial that the other people on Earth are who or what they are for my reasons. They can't do that because they are not me. I am is. I am is not them. They are them. I am is me. "Thou shalt have no other..."
That is not to say that they can't be me. How could they not be? There ain't but one me, so if their I-am-is be-co-me-s, where else can they turn except to the One me I am is too.
It never fails. I-am-is becomes a curiosity seeker in order to approach an other to chit chat and eventually ask, "Who are you?" Most usually, in amenable conditions where strangers with odd questions are tolerated, they will respond with the "I am's". Its a system very similar to the "begets".
"I am a native of this area. I am the son of my parents. I am my siblings brother. I am a student of life. I am a Christian or Jew or Muslim or Mormon, etal."
"I am a man. I am married. I am a husband. I am a father. I am a respectable, law abiding citizen. I am a suburbanite. I am a commuter. I am a licensed driver. I am a considerate person. I am fervent about the ethics and morals I practice. I am is your nemesis. I am an agent of a ancient secret cabal who has decided you must die immediately because you have ignorantly decided to allow I am to be yo' God. This belief is abject blasphemy, and your betters have decided that you are too stupid to procreate." Bang!
You may have discerned, dear reader, that this writer is not too fond of those who worship any other God than the One me each of us attempt to be with. Everybody wanna be with me. They unknowingly seek union with their I-am-is when they gotta abandon that crap and be-co-me.
The portal to the One universal me is the individual me. It's the entity each of us call ourselves in the first person singular. Me. As in, "That's me alright, I am is just like that." or "I simply wouldn't do what she's doing, that's not me. I am a different kind of person."
Untrue, in my less than sparkling opinion, every homo sapiens is the One me, and the only difference is what they declare I am is every other woid that comes outta they mouth. They're worshiping their subjective "idea" of what the One me is, and that's blasphemy of the spirit.
They worship a false god because they are of the One universal me, and pretend to be different to be-co-me as an individual "star" on Earth.
"This little light of mine,
I'm a'gonna let it shine.
This little light of mine,
I am is gwine let it shine,
Let it shine,
Let it shine,
Let... it... shiiiiiiiiine!
~ Old Protestant Spiritual
The two entities "me" and "I-am-is" appear to be that wot must be united to be-co-me One. In my stoically unceasing, but highly questionable opinion, most holy books somehow bring this subjective, eternal battle of the gods into play.
But, even if elements of duality are brought to atonement occasionally, for their own sake, their real work is apart from each other. Homo sapiens can't have One without the Other. They need each other something terrible. As my old Coharie Indian friend Billy Jacobs might say, "Ah hopes mah die they do." '-)
❦
For some, it seems, living life the way I do might be cruel, if they did what they think I do for their reasons. It's not easy to explain that I don't do what I do for their reasons. Any more than they do what they do for mine. In my world view it's not possible for either one or the other.
My youngest brother subscribes to one of those "word-a-day" dealios where the guy running the gig sends out a new word with the etymology and examples, and his opinion of the word of the day to boot. Infrequently he forwards a copy to me if he thinks I'll be interested in it.
A couple of days ago he forwarded the post in which the word-of-the-day was an expression rather than a single word. Maybe it's French or Latin or some other language. I don't care. It was "tu quoque". It means the subject/person is using another person as a sort of straw man to cause an attack on them for behavior they practice themselves.
Until my brother brought the tu quoque fallacy to my attention I have used the psychological descriptor "projection" to point out that a person is accusing some other person of acting or reacting to stimuli in the exact same way they would. Whether that behavior is treated by the observer as sinful or saintly is determined by how they would expect to be treated if they were "caught" performing the same act.
Observing that homo sapiens, as a species, have a tendency to ideate the notion that their fellow animals do what they do for the same reasons they would act that way, has been the ground of being for my irrefutable denial that the other people on Earth are who or what they are for my reasons. They can't do that because they are not me. I am is. I am is not them. They are them. I am is me. "Thou shalt have no other..."
That is not to say that they can't be me. How could they not be? There ain't but one me, so if their I-am-is be-co-me-s, where else can they turn except to the One me I am is too.
It never fails. I-am-is becomes a curiosity seeker in order to approach an other to chit chat and eventually ask, "Who are you?" Most usually, in amenable conditions where strangers with odd questions are tolerated, they will respond with the "I am's". Its a system very similar to the "begets".
"I am a native of this area. I am the son of my parents. I am my siblings brother. I am a student of life. I am a Christian or Jew or Muslim or Mormon, etal."
"I am a man. I am married. I am a husband. I am a father. I am a respectable, law abiding citizen. I am a suburbanite. I am a commuter. I am a licensed driver. I am a considerate person. I am fervent about the ethics and morals I practice. I am is your nemesis. I am an agent of a ancient secret cabal who has decided you must die immediately because you have ignorantly decided to allow I am to be yo' God. This belief is abject blasphemy, and your betters have decided that you are too stupid to procreate." Bang!
You may have discerned, dear reader, that this writer is not too fond of those who worship any other God than the One me each of us attempt to be with. Everybody wanna be with me. They unknowingly seek union with their I-am-is when they gotta abandon that crap and be-co-me.
The portal to the One universal me is the individual me. It's the entity each of us call ourselves in the first person singular. Me. As in, "That's me alright, I am is just like that." or "I simply wouldn't do what she's doing, that's not me. I am a different kind of person."
Untrue, in my less than sparkling opinion, every homo sapiens is the One me, and the only difference is what they declare I am is every other woid that comes outta they mouth. They're worshiping their subjective "idea" of what the One me is, and that's blasphemy of the spirit.
They worship a false god because they are of the One universal me, and pretend to be different to be-co-me as an individual "star" on Earth.
"This little light of mine,
I'm a'gonna let it shine.
This little light of mine,
I am is gwine let it shine,
Let it shine,
Let it shine,
Let... it... shiiiiiiiiine!
~ Old Protestant Spiritual
The two entities "me" and "I-am-is" appear to be that wot must be united to be-co-me One. In my stoically unceasing, but highly questionable opinion, most holy books somehow bring this subjective, eternal battle of the gods into play.
But, even if elements of duality are brought to atonement occasionally, for their own sake, their real work is apart from each other. Homo sapiens can't have One without the Other. They need each other something terrible. As my old Coharie Indian friend Billy Jacobs might say, "Ah hopes mah die they do." '-)
❦
Thursday, November 25, 2010
Intraocular Lenses And Vine-Ripened Tomatoes
❧
There are times when I get really mad at myself for not thinking to do stuff that's as simple as simple can be. In this instance I didn't think to Google up the readily available information about cataracts and cataract surgery on the internet. I literally asked people I correspond with to tell me what to expect, and none of them thought to tell me to look it up on the internet.
When I did that I used Jack's mention of IOLs as portal to get into this conversation. Intraocular lenses. The Results page reported ten gazillion hits. Apparently cataract surgery is a popular subject. More popular than ever with the Baby Boomers reaching the cataract stage of life.
The questions I've had about whats going is suddenly staring me in the face. This type of surgery has been in common practice now that every possible question about it from the patient to the doctors has been considered. Even when I clicked on the link to the first web site about it I got excited I had to stop reading after just a few paragraphs. That's why I'm writing about what I'm gonna read before I read it.
There is no obsession like my own current obsession, and when I'm not obsessed about anything I start getting depressed. I know better than to let that happen because I've done it deliberately before and may be lucky I came out of that little experience alive. Reading the first paragraphs was all it took to delight me with the prospect of a new obsession.
I've obsessed on the visual modality before and read lots of technical material I probably didn't understand all that keenly, but I did get it in there and left it for the rain to settle it down. There's nothing more embarrassing to me than to be handicapped in some way and not knowing it.
After a while, the psychological implications of what the foveal, parafoveal, and peripheral focus areas resolve to, reframed itself into a more intriguing insight that permits me to create more terse, unexpected, smart-ass remarks on the spur of the moment. What else is life for? '-)
The result of my getting obsessed makes me excited. Sometime so excited I have to get up and move around to contain myself. That's why I walked out on to the second-floor deck just outside the room my computer is in. Out there is where I keep the one plant I didn't take to my brother's greenhouse for the winter.
It's a pleasant ritual for me to go outside and look at this tomato plant. I put it in this big ceramic pot I borrowed from my sister-in-law, and it's produced fruit in two cycles. In the spring when I bought the plant at Lowe's and repotted in the ceramic pot it started growing and produced some tomatoes about the size of a golf ball.
In mid-summer the plant produced blossoms infrequently, but they didn't pollenate so well. I thought it was because of the problems the honey bees were said to be having, but that was wrong. Tomatoes are self-pollenating. Who knew? I figure my quest to produce some vine-ripened tomatoes had come to an end for this season.
Although I figured the plant would eventually die I decided to apply some fertilizer I had and keep it watered. By this time my goal had changed from farming my own vine-ripened tomatoes to finding out how long I could keep this plant alive before it croaked or Jack Frost bit it's nose.
If I stand out on my deck looking west at the sun setting in the sky and it's reflection off the family pond producing the impression of having two suns, the ornamental cabbage plant I've kept alive for over a year now has leaves that are getting greener with the cooler weather and the reduction of the length of the day. I like keeping stuff alive, including me.
The tomato plants had a second season. All of them. The upside-sown tomatoes I planted coming out of the bottom of the five-gallon plastic buckets I cut a hole in had twenty-four tomatoes growing on them when I hauled them on my should over to my brother's greenhouse.
The second cuttings I replaced the smashed plants that got killed when the handles of the plastic buckets broke got broke when I carried it over to the greenhouse, so I took a serrated steak knife from my kitchen and lopped off a couple of branches from the right-side-up plant in the ceramic pot.
With those two cuttings in hand I walked over to the greenhouse, took the steak knife and jabbed it up through the hole coming out of the bottom of the bucket to loosen the dirt in the bucket. Then, I dipped the cuttings in rooting hormone, and jammed them rudely up into the loosened potting soil, and they hadn't lost a single leaf in their new home when I looked at them yesterday.
This is a very exciting development. Growing tomatoes is opening itself to me slowly, but surely. I learned something today. My brother told me about how to know when a blueberry is fully ripe on the bush. The way you tell is that the stem of the berry turns brown. I can taste the difference even if the blueberries are approximately the same color.
It's the same way with tomatoes. When I walked out on my deck to take a break I saw one of the tomatoes on the bush in the ceramic pot that had been bright red for a week or more laying on the deck. It had fallen off the plant. I inspected the still attached stem, and it had turned color to a dark, brownish green. When the tomato was fully ripened, it fell of the plant of it's own volition. Now I know when tomatoes get as vine-ripened as they can be. It's when they become wireless. '-)
❦
There are times when I get really mad at myself for not thinking to do stuff that's as simple as simple can be. In this instance I didn't think to Google up the readily available information about cataracts and cataract surgery on the internet. I literally asked people I correspond with to tell me what to expect, and none of them thought to tell me to look it up on the internet.
When I did that I used Jack's mention of IOLs as portal to get into this conversation. Intraocular lenses. The Results page reported ten gazillion hits. Apparently cataract surgery is a popular subject. More popular than ever with the Baby Boomers reaching the cataract stage of life.
The questions I've had about whats going is suddenly staring me in the face. This type of surgery has been in common practice now that every possible question about it from the patient to the doctors has been considered. Even when I clicked on the link to the first web site about it I got excited I had to stop reading after just a few paragraphs. That's why I'm writing about what I'm gonna read before I read it.
There is no obsession like my own current obsession, and when I'm not obsessed about anything I start getting depressed. I know better than to let that happen because I've done it deliberately before and may be lucky I came out of that little experience alive. Reading the first paragraphs was all it took to delight me with the prospect of a new obsession.
I've obsessed on the visual modality before and read lots of technical material I probably didn't understand all that keenly, but I did get it in there and left it for the rain to settle it down. There's nothing more embarrassing to me than to be handicapped in some way and not knowing it.
After a while, the psychological implications of what the foveal, parafoveal, and peripheral focus areas resolve to, reframed itself into a more intriguing insight that permits me to create more terse, unexpected, smart-ass remarks on the spur of the moment. What else is life for? '-)
The result of my getting obsessed makes me excited. Sometime so excited I have to get up and move around to contain myself. That's why I walked out on to the second-floor deck just outside the room my computer is in. Out there is where I keep the one plant I didn't take to my brother's greenhouse for the winter.
It's a pleasant ritual for me to go outside and look at this tomato plant. I put it in this big ceramic pot I borrowed from my sister-in-law, and it's produced fruit in two cycles. In the spring when I bought the plant at Lowe's and repotted in the ceramic pot it started growing and produced some tomatoes about the size of a golf ball.
In mid-summer the plant produced blossoms infrequently, but they didn't pollenate so well. I thought it was because of the problems the honey bees were said to be having, but that was wrong. Tomatoes are self-pollenating. Who knew? I figure my quest to produce some vine-ripened tomatoes had come to an end for this season.
Although I figured the plant would eventually die I decided to apply some fertilizer I had and keep it watered. By this time my goal had changed from farming my own vine-ripened tomatoes to finding out how long I could keep this plant alive before it croaked or Jack Frost bit it's nose.
If I stand out on my deck looking west at the sun setting in the sky and it's reflection off the family pond producing the impression of having two suns, the ornamental cabbage plant I've kept alive for over a year now has leaves that are getting greener with the cooler weather and the reduction of the length of the day. I like keeping stuff alive, including me.
The tomato plants had a second season. All of them. The upside-sown tomatoes I planted coming out of the bottom of the five-gallon plastic buckets I cut a hole in had twenty-four tomatoes growing on them when I hauled them on my should over to my brother's greenhouse.
The second cuttings I replaced the smashed plants that got killed when the handles of the plastic buckets broke got broke when I carried it over to the greenhouse, so I took a serrated steak knife from my kitchen and lopped off a couple of branches from the right-side-up plant in the ceramic pot.
With those two cuttings in hand I walked over to the greenhouse, took the steak knife and jabbed it up through the hole coming out of the bottom of the bucket to loosen the dirt in the bucket. Then, I dipped the cuttings in rooting hormone, and jammed them rudely up into the loosened potting soil, and they hadn't lost a single leaf in their new home when I looked at them yesterday.
This is a very exciting development. Growing tomatoes is opening itself to me slowly, but surely. I learned something today. My brother told me about how to know when a blueberry is fully ripe on the bush. The way you tell is that the stem of the berry turns brown. I can taste the difference even if the blueberries are approximately the same color.
It's the same way with tomatoes. When I walked out on my deck to take a break I saw one of the tomatoes on the bush in the ceramic pot that had been bright red for a week or more laying on the deck. It had fallen off the plant. I inspected the still attached stem, and it had turned color to a dark, brownish green. When the tomato was fully ripened, it fell of the plant of it's own volition. Now I know when tomatoes get as vine-ripened as they can be. It's when they become wireless. '-)
❦
Wednesday, November 24, 2010
My Fight To The Death With Plants
❧
Not many people understand when I tell them that I'm presently occupied doing what I wanted to do for most of my life. I've got an inside place to be in order to say what I see in my mind's eye without interruption. It's probably true that I couldn't have foreseen where it would lead me.
It's like that quote of a Tibetan lama who was asked what he had learned from living in isolation for the past twenty years. His response was that "Death always comes unexpected." His point, as I interpreted it, might have been that a seeker can't plan for the event of their own death if they don't have a clue when it will happen.
To reframe, in a way, it can also be said that life is always unexpected. I never expected to live as long as I have, but despite all, I ain't dead yet. In the past I have claimed that I made decisions that sometime flirted with death. Now I'm not so sure the options I chose from meant what I once thought they did.
More often than not I find myself dealing with health problems I didn't anticipate. The other day I was working along the lane from the paved road that leads to me and my brother's houses. The lane runs north to south from the paved road, so that puts the west side of the lane facing the morning sun and any plants or bushes that grow there are thick as thieves.
The fact that I've had problems with these specific kinds of plants for most of my life can't possibly be coincidental. The main culprit is a plant used for landscaping. It's a shrubbery bush gone wild all over the place. It takes over the area it grows and shades every other plant out of existence. I don't know the formal name for it, but I wanna call it boxwood.
Another prolific plant that grows on the edge of the boxwood plant is multiflora rose used to make living fences. The thorns are very invasive and rip at one's flesh. My father mistakenly imported this plant because it was recommended by his mentors up to the State University Agricultural College, and he decided to lead the way for the area farmers to follow. It went wild too.
The other plant involved in this hodgepodge of plants that line the west side of the lane that leads to my house is what the local folk call a China berry tree. Apparently, from the brief research I just did, the Chinaberry tree is not just local here, but an invasive non-native plant that's taking over the world:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Melia_azedarach
This tree and I have a history, and I'm almost positive it found out where I live and set up residence to plague me some more. The history part of it happened when my natal family lived about fifty miles east of here in a yellow house my parents rented.
This house was on the corner of the main highway that passed through this small, coastal plains town, and a lane that crossed in front of it that was only about a half-mile long. The house was built in an "L" shape with the long parts of the "L" facing these two public thoroughfares. That put the inside of the "L" in the back of the house and offered the only privacy the place afforded.
The Chinaberry trees grew in a straight line from the small lane parallel to the house and along with some shrubbery provided a little nook for my family. Practically all the outside activities centered around this spot in what we called the backyard.
What happened was that I liked to climb in these trees. I may have been warned that the limbs of a Chinaberry tree are pulpy on the inside, and snap into quite easily. When they break, they break completely into two parts with no splintering to slow the process down. I found this out for sure one day when I climbed out too far on one of the Chinaberry limbs.
Down I came with no advanced warning, and landed flat on my back. The fall knocked the breath out of me, and it also paralyzed me for a moment or two. I couldn't breath and I couldn't move. I thought for sure I was dead. That's as much as I knew about death at the time. I was suddenly rendered helpless, so I must be dead.
The combination of Chinaberry trees, boxwood shrubbery plants gone wild, and my father's imported multiflora rose that was originally planted over a mile away, caused me to hurt myself while I was trying to get some control over their attempt to eradicate my driveway.
I hurt myself with a pair of pruning shears that have turned out to be one of my useful tools for preventing the plants around my house from eating my house and me alive. The handles are about two feet long, and there is an extra leverage system built into them so larger limbs can be lopped off with less strength.
According to the type of wood I'm trying to shear off, I can cut limbs and small saplings up to two inches thick. Not the boxwood bushes though. They are tough and difficult to lop off. That's how I hurt myself. I tried to cut through a boxwood branch about an inch and a half thick (3.80 cm), and the angle I had for squeezing the handles on my pruning shears was at a lousy angle.
That's when I made the mistake of bracing one of the handles against my chest, and using both hands on the other handle to try and get the limb sheared through. Instead I fractured a rib or two in my upper chest. It hurt really bad and prophetically at the same time. I.E., I knew when it happened it was a stupid thing to do, and I was gonna pay for my dumb ass ways for a long time.
I stopped working and went to Lowe's to buy the pruning saw I'd checked out previously. My brother next door had one he'd loan me for a small job, but I had too much work I wanted to get done to dull his saw, so I bought my own. The saw wasn't cheap, and I am is a miser. Hurting myself made me more reasonable real fast.
It's been over a week since that incident happened. I started to write "since that accident happened", but it wasn't exactly an accident. It was those plants trying to kill me to keep me from killing them. They'll win in the end. At least against me. I will go back out there when I'm up to it, and I will control their growth to keep the entrance to my house clear. For a while, and then I'll die, and they will conquer all until they're conquered. Ain't life grand?
❦
Not many people understand when I tell them that I'm presently occupied doing what I wanted to do for most of my life. I've got an inside place to be in order to say what I see in my mind's eye without interruption. It's probably true that I couldn't have foreseen where it would lead me.
It's like that quote of a Tibetan lama who was asked what he had learned from living in isolation for the past twenty years. His response was that "Death always comes unexpected." His point, as I interpreted it, might have been that a seeker can't plan for the event of their own death if they don't have a clue when it will happen.
To reframe, in a way, it can also be said that life is always unexpected. I never expected to live as long as I have, but despite all, I ain't dead yet. In the past I have claimed that I made decisions that sometime flirted with death. Now I'm not so sure the options I chose from meant what I once thought they did.
More often than not I find myself dealing with health problems I didn't anticipate. The other day I was working along the lane from the paved road that leads to me and my brother's houses. The lane runs north to south from the paved road, so that puts the west side of the lane facing the morning sun and any plants or bushes that grow there are thick as thieves.
The fact that I've had problems with these specific kinds of plants for most of my life can't possibly be coincidental. The main culprit is a plant used for landscaping. It's a shrubbery bush gone wild all over the place. It takes over the area it grows and shades every other plant out of existence. I don't know the formal name for it, but I wanna call it boxwood.
Another prolific plant that grows on the edge of the boxwood plant is multiflora rose used to make living fences. The thorns are very invasive and rip at one's flesh. My father mistakenly imported this plant because it was recommended by his mentors up to the State University Agricultural College, and he decided to lead the way for the area farmers to follow. It went wild too.
The other plant involved in this hodgepodge of plants that line the west side of the lane that leads to my house is what the local folk call a China berry tree. Apparently, from the brief research I just did, the Chinaberry tree is not just local here, but an invasive non-native plant that's taking over the world:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Melia_azedarach
This tree and I have a history, and I'm almost positive it found out where I live and set up residence to plague me some more. The history part of it happened when my natal family lived about fifty miles east of here in a yellow house my parents rented.
This house was on the corner of the main highway that passed through this small, coastal plains town, and a lane that crossed in front of it that was only about a half-mile long. The house was built in an "L" shape with the long parts of the "L" facing these two public thoroughfares. That put the inside of the "L" in the back of the house and offered the only privacy the place afforded.
The Chinaberry trees grew in a straight line from the small lane parallel to the house and along with some shrubbery provided a little nook for my family. Practically all the outside activities centered around this spot in what we called the backyard.
What happened was that I liked to climb in these trees. I may have been warned that the limbs of a Chinaberry tree are pulpy on the inside, and snap into quite easily. When they break, they break completely into two parts with no splintering to slow the process down. I found this out for sure one day when I climbed out too far on one of the Chinaberry limbs.
Down I came with no advanced warning, and landed flat on my back. The fall knocked the breath out of me, and it also paralyzed me for a moment or two. I couldn't breath and I couldn't move. I thought for sure I was dead. That's as much as I knew about death at the time. I was suddenly rendered helpless, so I must be dead.
The combination of Chinaberry trees, boxwood shrubbery plants gone wild, and my father's imported multiflora rose that was originally planted over a mile away, caused me to hurt myself while I was trying to get some control over their attempt to eradicate my driveway.
I hurt myself with a pair of pruning shears that have turned out to be one of my useful tools for preventing the plants around my house from eating my house and me alive. The handles are about two feet long, and there is an extra leverage system built into them so larger limbs can be lopped off with less strength.
According to the type of wood I'm trying to shear off, I can cut limbs and small saplings up to two inches thick. Not the boxwood bushes though. They are tough and difficult to lop off. That's how I hurt myself. I tried to cut through a boxwood branch about an inch and a half thick (3.80 cm), and the angle I had for squeezing the handles on my pruning shears was at a lousy angle.
That's when I made the mistake of bracing one of the handles against my chest, and using both hands on the other handle to try and get the limb sheared through. Instead I fractured a rib or two in my upper chest. It hurt really bad and prophetically at the same time. I.E., I knew when it happened it was a stupid thing to do, and I was gonna pay for my dumb ass ways for a long time.
I stopped working and went to Lowe's to buy the pruning saw I'd checked out previously. My brother next door had one he'd loan me for a small job, but I had too much work I wanted to get done to dull his saw, so I bought my own. The saw wasn't cheap, and I am is a miser. Hurting myself made me more reasonable real fast.
It's been over a week since that incident happened. I started to write "since that accident happened", but it wasn't exactly an accident. It was those plants trying to kill me to keep me from killing them. They'll win in the end. At least against me. I will go back out there when I'm up to it, and I will control their growth to keep the entrance to my house clear. For a while, and then I'll die, and they will conquer all until they're conquered. Ain't life grand?
❦
Tuesday, November 23, 2010
"Poppa Said To Momma, Johnny Can't Come Home..."
❧
The human body is very strange to me these days. I've been having some problems with sore spots on my lips and mouth that I've tried all sorts of creams and diet changes, and nothing worked. It turns out that it's the same problem I have on my toes. It's odd to me that I had to figure this out for myself, but that's the VA Hospital system. It's hard to bite the hand that feeds me. I don't expect much. I rather enjoy doing for myself.
It's incurable. Like the rheumatoid arthritis and osteoporosis. Some experts think it's hereditary. Its "the heartbreak called psoriasis." It's not contagious. It's not going to kill me outright, but some irritating pain is involved. Hot, spicy foods burn these spots.
It makes my lips swell a bit. Enough so that the additional thickness causes me to accidentally bite down on the spots that are already sore. That's the worst part. I don't know exactly what it looks like to others in face-to-face situations because the cataracts in my eyes keep me from being able to focus on it well.
Getting the cataracts removed has been a non-rewarding pursuit until recently. I have an appointment at the VA Hospital with the eye surgeon. I have a little bit of an idea of what could happen from my previous encounter with an independent eye surgeon here in town. He measured my eyeball for the correct size lens to replace the cataracts.
The reason I didn't get that surgeon to do it was because of some question about whether the insurance company would pay the remainder of the bill after what comes with Social Security would pay, and there was some question about whether Social Security would pay either.
Now, with the VA Hospital doing the surgery I won't have to worry about paying anything. I don't have a choice about which surgeon will perform the procedure, but the government contracts the surgeon to do it, and so I know it will probably be a greedy one who wants the additional money for to pay for his Christmas.
I'm more prone to trust greedy people. Why would I not? According to my occult studies, specifically the Enneagrams, avarice is what they call my chief feature. Most of my problems arrive as a result of me clinging to stuff longer than it has value to me.
The entire point of this particular lifetime seems to be about me learning to let go of what I've falsely considered valuable. I've had to learn to trust myself despite my inclination to act like the fictionalized "Bah! Humbug!" guy.
There is more of me than I can possibly be. Ever. There is not enough ti-me in one human life to be-co-me with all the possibilities that came with this body. Of course, it was already fourteen years old when I got it through bartering with the young spirit who had it before me.
For my me there was only a glimmering of this exchange in a whispery unembodied transaction. I was out of my last old body and the young spirit was with his pubescent body when the bargain was struck, sealed, and approved. Once it was all over but the shouting, the exchange happened almost immediately.
Perhaps it just seemed that way because time always flies when I-am-is has fun. Getting a comparatively new body in exchange for an old one has eternally been fun for I-am-is. Mostly because I-am-is-me. I-am-is the adventurer most of the ti-me, but only because it has a tie-to-me (ti-me). So, its not actually I-am-is that has the fun that makes time fly, as much as it is my me, and by extension, the me.
So-me-ti-me the more-of-me is all there is, because I-am-is on hiatus. In this case, I-am-is cannot "be" me. It is "being" so-me-thing else than this or that. The whole point of I am is to be something, but the only procedure that allows it to "be" something is to deny whatever it was to be that or this. My God is a jealous God. '-)
Atonement (at-one-me-nt) doesn't do the me-and-thee-ing bit. They can't ex-is-t in the sa-me town. It-is (cornucopia) ain't big enough for them both when push co-me-s to shove. It's an enigma wrapped in a paradox. The whole point of I-am is to be something.
It really doesn't have any thing to do without being something, and when it ain't nothing it's just "crying time again, you gonna leave me". It can be-co-me anything the me wants it to. I am is has no sha-me. It will do anything for me. I am is mah bitch! Man.... Wot chew talking?
You've probably seen I am in action. I made up a little poem to define it a bit:
I am is this
I am is that
It gnows
ten ways to
skin a cat.
So, does I-am-is disappear when my me is atoned with the me? Maybe not, and it seems to get a little huffy about being snubbed while the personal me and the universal me commune. In the Wilhelm/Baynes translation of the I Ching this is symbolized by two mountains sitting back to back. The equivalent Greek God is Janus. The all-seeing center of both future and past. WiseDome.
In the cultivated mind I am can't be me any ol' ti-me it needs comforting. It's gotta wait it's turn. The personal me is not gonna give up an intimate condition with the universal me without disfavor. Like a young doG, I-am-is goes through it's entire repertoire of care actors to attract the me away from it's father, but it's a once in a life time deal. Fat chance ...eh?
❦
The human body is very strange to me these days. I've been having some problems with sore spots on my lips and mouth that I've tried all sorts of creams and diet changes, and nothing worked. It turns out that it's the same problem I have on my toes. It's odd to me that I had to figure this out for myself, but that's the VA Hospital system. It's hard to bite the hand that feeds me. I don't expect much. I rather enjoy doing for myself.
It's incurable. Like the rheumatoid arthritis and osteoporosis. Some experts think it's hereditary. Its "the heartbreak called psoriasis." It's not contagious. It's not going to kill me outright, but some irritating pain is involved. Hot, spicy foods burn these spots.
It makes my lips swell a bit. Enough so that the additional thickness causes me to accidentally bite down on the spots that are already sore. That's the worst part. I don't know exactly what it looks like to others in face-to-face situations because the cataracts in my eyes keep me from being able to focus on it well.
Getting the cataracts removed has been a non-rewarding pursuit until recently. I have an appointment at the VA Hospital with the eye surgeon. I have a little bit of an idea of what could happen from my previous encounter with an independent eye surgeon here in town. He measured my eyeball for the correct size lens to replace the cataracts.
The reason I didn't get that surgeon to do it was because of some question about whether the insurance company would pay the remainder of the bill after what comes with Social Security would pay, and there was some question about whether Social Security would pay either.
Now, with the VA Hospital doing the surgery I won't have to worry about paying anything. I don't have a choice about which surgeon will perform the procedure, but the government contracts the surgeon to do it, and so I know it will probably be a greedy one who wants the additional money for to pay for his Christmas.
I'm more prone to trust greedy people. Why would I not? According to my occult studies, specifically the Enneagrams, avarice is what they call my chief feature. Most of my problems arrive as a result of me clinging to stuff longer than it has value to me.
The entire point of this particular lifetime seems to be about me learning to let go of what I've falsely considered valuable. I've had to learn to trust myself despite my inclination to act like the fictionalized "Bah! Humbug!" guy.
There is more of me than I can possibly be. Ever. There is not enough ti-me in one human life to be-co-me with all the possibilities that came with this body. Of course, it was already fourteen years old when I got it through bartering with the young spirit who had it before me.
For my me there was only a glimmering of this exchange in a whispery unembodied transaction. I was out of my last old body and the young spirit was with his pubescent body when the bargain was struck, sealed, and approved. Once it was all over but the shouting, the exchange happened almost immediately.
Perhaps it just seemed that way because time always flies when I-am-is has fun. Getting a comparatively new body in exchange for an old one has eternally been fun for I-am-is. Mostly because I-am-is-me. I-am-is the adventurer most of the ti-me, but only because it has a tie-to-me (ti-me). So, its not actually I-am-is that has the fun that makes time fly, as much as it is my me, and by extension, the me.
So-me-ti-me the more-of-me is all there is, because I-am-is on hiatus. In this case, I-am-is cannot "be" me. It is "being" so-me-thing else than this or that. The whole point of I am is to be something, but the only procedure that allows it to "be" something is to deny whatever it was to be that or this. My God is a jealous God. '-)
Atonement (at-one-me-nt) doesn't do the me-and-thee-ing bit. They can't ex-is-t in the sa-me town. It-is (cornucopia) ain't big enough for them both when push co-me-s to shove. It's an enigma wrapped in a paradox. The whole point of I-am is to be something.
It really doesn't have any thing to do without being something, and when it ain't nothing it's just "crying time again, you gonna leave me". It can be-co-me anything the me wants it to. I am is has no sha-me. It will do anything for me. I am is mah bitch! Man.... Wot chew talking?
You've probably seen I am in action. I made up a little poem to define it a bit:
I am is this
I am is that
It gnows
ten ways to
skin a cat.
So, does I-am-is disappear when my me is atoned with the me? Maybe not, and it seems to get a little huffy about being snubbed while the personal me and the universal me commune. In the Wilhelm/Baynes translation of the I Ching this is symbolized by two mountains sitting back to back. The equivalent Greek God is Janus. The all-seeing center of both future and past. WiseDome.
In the cultivated mind I am can't be me any ol' ti-me it needs comforting. It's gotta wait it's turn. The personal me is not gonna give up an intimate condition with the universal me without disfavor. Like a young doG, I-am-is goes through it's entire repertoire of care actors to attract the me away from it's father, but it's a once in a life time deal. Fat chance ...eh?
❦
Monday, November 22, 2010
Beggars Can't Be Choosers
❧
This was a nice morning to take a shower and go outside in the warm sunlight to dry off. Since I have no sex life and I'm not around other human beings so much it doesn't matter whether I take frequent showers or not. Basically, I showered today in order to shave while doing it. I haven't shaved for maybe as much as two years.
Cutting my own hair is a no-brainer because I cut my own hair with a buzz cut style. I started buying cheap shears when they're on sale, use them until they get dull, and replace them with other cheap shears. Its the American way. It's cheaper to buy new ones than pay to sharpen the old ones. I have no skill at all at sharpening anything. I just don't have the knack for it.
I first found out I was a lousy sharpener in my first enlistment in the Navy. I got thrown out of the electronic school I was attending, and due to that I got assigned to a tincan destroyer as a bosun's mate. There I was expected to learn to tie all the knots the bosuns used to tie, and keep a sharp knife with a bowline blade for untangling knots.
There were certain people who did understand how to sharpen knife keen enough to shave with, but I wasn't one of them. I seem to drive the people whose job it was to instruct me crazy. I wasn't not doing it to get over either. Even today I need sharp knives, and if I could do it I might carve wood as a hobby. No dice, man.
It amazes me to keep discovering how long I've had this rheumatoid arthritis going on in varied ways, and that a lot of little health problems I thought was due to something else was really an aspect of RA. In the case at hand it's psoriasis. I have it on my toes. Same toes every time it pops up. It comes and goes as it will.
Just this morning I realized that the problems I've had with my lips is probably psoriasis. It happens right in the center of them. It seems to be the dividing point of the nerves of my face. Its easy to think about because of when I go to the dentist to get a tooth filled, and the anesthesia he injects only affects the gums on one side.
When it gets to the middle of my jaw it stops. If he's working with the other side it numbs my gums and jaws right up to the center front, and then it stops. It's right at that center point that the psoriasis shows up. Sometimes it's on the lower lip, and other times, like now, its on the upper lip, but like on my toes, it's the exact same spot each attach, and there is nothing i can do except wait for it to go away.
Since it comes and goes like an attack, and there is nothing available to heal it or make it retreat, at least I know my options or rather the lack of them, and stop buying expensive creams to see if they might work better than the last expensive antidote I tried. I don't know what it looks like, but in a month or so I'll have a better chance to see it.
My upcoming appointment with the eye surgeon at the VA Hospital is getting closer. Nothing will happen on that first appointment as far as I know, but after he takes a look and sees what he thinks can be done for me I'll have a better idea. I'm hoping to have at least one eye done by Christmas, but that's not up to me to decide. Beggars can't be choosers.
Electric violins have been on my mind lately. I decided to Google up "electric violins" and the results page showed a link to a site that calls itself The Electric Violin Store, and it's located near the VA Hospital up in Durham where I go to the RA clinic.
I clicked in to their web site and after I watched the video they provided that was mostly about how to find their Durham location, I began looking at their products. The only electric violins I've ever known about, and I've never seen one in person, have been pictures of a Yamaha practice violin from years ago.
http://www.electricviolinshop.com/
The market for electric violins seems to have expanded a lot. The reason the Yamaha "practice violin" intrigued me was that it's not made of wood, and had none of the problems wooden violins have with humidity. The price of that first one I saw was over $500, so I knew they weren't cheap.
After looking at all the various brands and individual electric violin makers on this web site, I realized that $500 was damn cheap. There were only two on the whole site that were under a $1000, and most of them were more expensive than $2-3,000. Wow! Too rich for my blood.
After I saw a demo on YouTube of a guy playing an electric fiddle I started watching other people play them. The videos were all shot on the street of guys playing them for tips. The quality of the sound of the videos was horrible, but distinct enough for me to realize I probably wouldn't wanna do that.
As you might figure, electric violins are really digital violins, and digitally they do stuff besides allow the player to just play violin. They're a lot like my digital piano that has a drum machine and all sorts of instruments you can select to play by merely pushing a button or a combination of buttons and you can sound like a full 64-piece orchestra.
I don't mean to be uppity about it, but playing digital instruments is just tacky. Part of being audience to an accomplished musician playing a fine acoustic instrument if knowing how much practice and dedication it takes for the artist to do what they're doing to entertain me. With digital instruments its difficult to ignore that what I'm hearing is most likely the work of a computer programmer than a musician, and I feel duped. No blame. '-)
❦
This was a nice morning to take a shower and go outside in the warm sunlight to dry off. Since I have no sex life and I'm not around other human beings so much it doesn't matter whether I take frequent showers or not. Basically, I showered today in order to shave while doing it. I haven't shaved for maybe as much as two years.
Cutting my own hair is a no-brainer because I cut my own hair with a buzz cut style. I started buying cheap shears when they're on sale, use them until they get dull, and replace them with other cheap shears. Its the American way. It's cheaper to buy new ones than pay to sharpen the old ones. I have no skill at all at sharpening anything. I just don't have the knack for it.
I first found out I was a lousy sharpener in my first enlistment in the Navy. I got thrown out of the electronic school I was attending, and due to that I got assigned to a tincan destroyer as a bosun's mate. There I was expected to learn to tie all the knots the bosuns used to tie, and keep a sharp knife with a bowline blade for untangling knots.
There were certain people who did understand how to sharpen knife keen enough to shave with, but I wasn't one of them. I seem to drive the people whose job it was to instruct me crazy. I wasn't not doing it to get over either. Even today I need sharp knives, and if I could do it I might carve wood as a hobby. No dice, man.
It amazes me to keep discovering how long I've had this rheumatoid arthritis going on in varied ways, and that a lot of little health problems I thought was due to something else was really an aspect of RA. In the case at hand it's psoriasis. I have it on my toes. Same toes every time it pops up. It comes and goes as it will.
Just this morning I realized that the problems I've had with my lips is probably psoriasis. It happens right in the center of them. It seems to be the dividing point of the nerves of my face. Its easy to think about because of when I go to the dentist to get a tooth filled, and the anesthesia he injects only affects the gums on one side.
When it gets to the middle of my jaw it stops. If he's working with the other side it numbs my gums and jaws right up to the center front, and then it stops. It's right at that center point that the psoriasis shows up. Sometimes it's on the lower lip, and other times, like now, its on the upper lip, but like on my toes, it's the exact same spot each attach, and there is nothing i can do except wait for it to go away.
Since it comes and goes like an attack, and there is nothing available to heal it or make it retreat, at least I know my options or rather the lack of them, and stop buying expensive creams to see if they might work better than the last expensive antidote I tried. I don't know what it looks like, but in a month or so I'll have a better chance to see it.
My upcoming appointment with the eye surgeon at the VA Hospital is getting closer. Nothing will happen on that first appointment as far as I know, but after he takes a look and sees what he thinks can be done for me I'll have a better idea. I'm hoping to have at least one eye done by Christmas, but that's not up to me to decide. Beggars can't be choosers.
Electric violins have been on my mind lately. I decided to Google up "electric violins" and the results page showed a link to a site that calls itself The Electric Violin Store, and it's located near the VA Hospital up in Durham where I go to the RA clinic.
I clicked in to their web site and after I watched the video they provided that was mostly about how to find their Durham location, I began looking at their products. The only electric violins I've ever known about, and I've never seen one in person, have been pictures of a Yamaha practice violin from years ago.
http://www.electricviolinshop.com/
The market for electric violins seems to have expanded a lot. The reason the Yamaha "practice violin" intrigued me was that it's not made of wood, and had none of the problems wooden violins have with humidity. The price of that first one I saw was over $500, so I knew they weren't cheap.
After looking at all the various brands and individual electric violin makers on this web site, I realized that $500 was damn cheap. There were only two on the whole site that were under a $1000, and most of them were more expensive than $2-3,000. Wow! Too rich for my blood.
After I saw a demo on YouTube of a guy playing an electric fiddle I started watching other people play them. The videos were all shot on the street of guys playing them for tips. The quality of the sound of the videos was horrible, but distinct enough for me to realize I probably wouldn't wanna do that.
As you might figure, electric violins are really digital violins, and digitally they do stuff besides allow the player to just play violin. They're a lot like my digital piano that has a drum machine and all sorts of instruments you can select to play by merely pushing a button or a combination of buttons and you can sound like a full 64-piece orchestra.
I don't mean to be uppity about it, but playing digital instruments is just tacky. Part of being audience to an accomplished musician playing a fine acoustic instrument if knowing how much practice and dedication it takes for the artist to do what they're doing to entertain me. With digital instruments its difficult to ignore that what I'm hearing is most likely the work of a computer programmer than a musician, and I feel duped. No blame. '-)
❦
Sunday, November 21, 2010
Becoming What I Always Wanted To Be
❧
The pants I put on this morning presented a challenge. They're hand-me-ups designer jeans from my brothers throwaway bag. His wife brought over a bunch of pants after he lost a lot of weight. Some of them fit me, and some of them don't. This pair is a "maybe". I can get them on, but whether or not I can wear them depends on how much they stretch out after being washed.
These pants are not the only ones I'm sorting through. I lose and gain weight frequently, so I have an abundant supply of pants I keep around for when I get fat. I have a habit of keeping those, because I can still wear them when I lose weight for whatever reason. It's the ones I save for getting skinny that I'm burning. My attitude about clothes gets pretty sloppy. Slack. Very slack.
Now in my early seventies I'm not trying to attract sexual partners. The cutesy behaviors people exhibit that are associated with appearing sexy just to give themselves options is interesting, but not intriguing except as fodder for reactive contemplation.
After I went through a vasectomy procedure, the procreative aspect of it became futile, and that futility became a goal to discover how aware the average human is that their entire life is centered around reproduction, even when they pretend to themselves it is not, and even particularly when they pretend it is not.
I wasn't castrated by the vasectomy. The doctor just snipped the vas diferens tube that carried the sperm up from the scrotum and loaded my trusty scattergun, such that it wasn't trusty any more. I wasn't a threat to anyone because I shot blanks.
Shooting blanks doesn't get anybody pregnant, but it does question the point of having sex purely for recreation. It's not that sex wasn't fun anymore. Who doesn't enjoy the pleasure of sexual climax? The body is designed that way. If a man didn't seek the pleasure associated with reaching a climax, why would he suffer through the pain that sometime happens on his way there?
If you're a male human and you haven't been neutered there is no reason to reflect on these topics. If you're a female human who goes through menopause, then you don't have any choice but to consider the implications of having sex without the possibility of getting pregnant. For one thing, women who can't have children for any reason at all don't get adored like impregnable women who can.
It took a long time for me to adapt to shooting blanks, and not just the physical part of it, but more importantly, the mental part of it. Perhaps it might be more accurate to write that it's the philosophical/world view part of being neutered. Nobody knows unless I tell them. They don't know why their usual way of dealing with male humans don't get the usual results from me.
That aspect of this deal is probably what I'm attempting to address. I watch myself not react to people in what used to be my usual way, but it hasn't been my "usual way" now for around thirty years. The vasectomy was performed at the age of forty-two and I'm seventy-one now.
I have been surgically neutered for more than half of my adult life. You'd think I'd have gotten over it, and I have physically, but my amazement at how human males of all ages and females in their fertile years are totally controlled by sperm and egg.
In my own opinion about my own behavior I don't think I could have taken a vasectomy if I hadn't learned that I can experience ecstasy in a variety of ways other than reaching a sexual climax. Candidly, I wouldn't have taken it if having this procedure done would have disallowed having sexual climaxes. By definition, ecstasy by any means is a good thing.
I seem to have always received a lot of pleasure by giving pleasure to others. Doing it exclusively by physical manipulation with one person can't compare with inducing spiritual or political ecstasy for a thousand people all at the same ti-me. In that way the people who are confused by not getting the usual reaction from me due to me being neutered don't go away from me empty-handed. '-)
I've written about how I've been vulnerable to charismatic people all my life, and my spiritual quest was basically to find out how they were able to manipulate me into a conversion experience with no holds barred without my conscious cooperation.
Those charismatics were my childhood heroes. They were the people I wanted to be like when I grew up. I didn't realize that as my life time goal until the last decade or so. That is probably a good thing, because if I had known what I was trying to accomplish I would have gotten in my own way.
The third puberty cycle that begins just before a person's seventy-second birthday is upon me. I haven't reflected upon what might happen much. The first puberty cycle that happens at the average age of twelves years old is physical and very evident to everyone concerned. The second puberty cycle happens just prior to the age of forty-two, and it's about matriculating into having mental power.
I have read about the third puberty cycle being that of the matriculation of spiritual power. How one defines that might be tricky. After the first puberty a human can physically reproduce. After the second puberty cycle a human can use memes to reproduce abstract constructs. Theoretically, after the third puberty cycle a human matriculates into using spiritual power, but is it similar to physical or mental power?
The question for me, in this regard, is how could I recognize that I was manipulating power in the moment of it's occurrence. How can I become consciously aware such spiritual power is for real, and learn how to let it happen more proficiently. Hah! That'll be the day...
❦
The pants I put on this morning presented a challenge. They're hand-me-ups designer jeans from my brothers throwaway bag. His wife brought over a bunch of pants after he lost a lot of weight. Some of them fit me, and some of them don't. This pair is a "maybe". I can get them on, but whether or not I can wear them depends on how much they stretch out after being washed.
These pants are not the only ones I'm sorting through. I lose and gain weight frequently, so I have an abundant supply of pants I keep around for when I get fat. I have a habit of keeping those, because I can still wear them when I lose weight for whatever reason. It's the ones I save for getting skinny that I'm burning. My attitude about clothes gets pretty sloppy. Slack. Very slack.
Now in my early seventies I'm not trying to attract sexual partners. The cutesy behaviors people exhibit that are associated with appearing sexy just to give themselves options is interesting, but not intriguing except as fodder for reactive contemplation.
After I went through a vasectomy procedure, the procreative aspect of it became futile, and that futility became a goal to discover how aware the average human is that their entire life is centered around reproduction, even when they pretend to themselves it is not, and even particularly when they pretend it is not.
I wasn't castrated by the vasectomy. The doctor just snipped the vas diferens tube that carried the sperm up from the scrotum and loaded my trusty scattergun, such that it wasn't trusty any more. I wasn't a threat to anyone because I shot blanks.
Shooting blanks doesn't get anybody pregnant, but it does question the point of having sex purely for recreation. It's not that sex wasn't fun anymore. Who doesn't enjoy the pleasure of sexual climax? The body is designed that way. If a man didn't seek the pleasure associated with reaching a climax, why would he suffer through the pain that sometime happens on his way there?
If you're a male human and you haven't been neutered there is no reason to reflect on these topics. If you're a female human who goes through menopause, then you don't have any choice but to consider the implications of having sex without the possibility of getting pregnant. For one thing, women who can't have children for any reason at all don't get adored like impregnable women who can.
It took a long time for me to adapt to shooting blanks, and not just the physical part of it, but more importantly, the mental part of it. Perhaps it might be more accurate to write that it's the philosophical/world view part of being neutered. Nobody knows unless I tell them. They don't know why their usual way of dealing with male humans don't get the usual results from me.
That aspect of this deal is probably what I'm attempting to address. I watch myself not react to people in what used to be my usual way, but it hasn't been my "usual way" now for around thirty years. The vasectomy was performed at the age of forty-two and I'm seventy-one now.
I have been surgically neutered for more than half of my adult life. You'd think I'd have gotten over it, and I have physically, but my amazement at how human males of all ages and females in their fertile years are totally controlled by sperm and egg.
In my own opinion about my own behavior I don't think I could have taken a vasectomy if I hadn't learned that I can experience ecstasy in a variety of ways other than reaching a sexual climax. Candidly, I wouldn't have taken it if having this procedure done would have disallowed having sexual climaxes. By definition, ecstasy by any means is a good thing.
I seem to have always received a lot of pleasure by giving pleasure to others. Doing it exclusively by physical manipulation with one person can't compare with inducing spiritual or political ecstasy for a thousand people all at the same ti-me. In that way the people who are confused by not getting the usual reaction from me due to me being neutered don't go away from me empty-handed. '-)
I've written about how I've been vulnerable to charismatic people all my life, and my spiritual quest was basically to find out how they were able to manipulate me into a conversion experience with no holds barred without my conscious cooperation.
Those charismatics were my childhood heroes. They were the people I wanted to be like when I grew up. I didn't realize that as my life time goal until the last decade or so. That is probably a good thing, because if I had known what I was trying to accomplish I would have gotten in my own way.
The third puberty cycle that begins just before a person's seventy-second birthday is upon me. I haven't reflected upon what might happen much. The first puberty cycle that happens at the average age of twelves years old is physical and very evident to everyone concerned. The second puberty cycle happens just prior to the age of forty-two, and it's about matriculating into having mental power.
I have read about the third puberty cycle being that of the matriculation of spiritual power. How one defines that might be tricky. After the first puberty a human can physically reproduce. After the second puberty cycle a human can use memes to reproduce abstract constructs. Theoretically, after the third puberty cycle a human matriculates into using spiritual power, but is it similar to physical or mental power?
The question for me, in this regard, is how could I recognize that I was manipulating power in the moment of it's occurrence. How can I become consciously aware such spiritual power is for real, and learn how to let it happen more proficiently. Hah! That'll be the day...
❦
Saturday, November 20, 2010
Clumsily Data Mining For The Origins Of Speech
❧
I read all 114 sayings in the Gospel of Thomas twice this morning. Earlier, I could have sworn there was at least one saying that specifically mentions suffering. I was wrong. It isn't mentioned in the Davies translation. My wastrel's search for the origins of human speech is speculative arrogance. Why would I not? Keeping to my weird habits I've used the Davies version of the saying exclusively since I subscribed to the GoT e-mail discussion group.
Choosing one translated version of any holy book works for me. I used and studied the Wilhelm/Baynes translation of the I Ching for a long time. I read the James Legge classical Sinologist's translation previously, but it didn't seem to have a path with heart for me. I never used any other I Ching translations although many more became available over the next thirty-odd years. Too much information confuses my goals for studying such devices.
Besides, I believe in magic and fate and kismet and myths and fairy tales. I hate being confused by facts. Facticities (cities built from presumed facts/paradise/heaven/utopia/nuclear bombs) are for sissies who have no imagination or creativity.
Acquiring a horde of pertinent facts don't make anybody immortal. Facts' priesthood don't enter their abstractly constructed paradise, and they don't let anyone else in there either. It's spiritual extortion plain and simple. "Hell no, I won't go! Hell no, I won't go! Hell no..."
Sayings #68 and #69 in the Gospel of Thomas address persecution, but the term "suffering" is not specifically mentioned. I am finds itself thinking about physical suffering of the kind that would cause people to moan in distress. To utter stuff to indicate pain or perhaps even ecstasy. Perhaps both, Ecstagony! What's not to like about puling in hard-earned joy over finding food or water after a drought. "We're saved! Thank God Almighty, we're saved!"
It has crossed my mind several times recently that human speech uttered in pain or happiness might be involuntarily shared during a special empathetical moment like what might transpire between a new mother and her midwife cooing over the sight of a newborn. Deliberately re-member-ing such a share event by uttering the same sounds that happened in the past might be considered a primal form of human speech.
Perhaps later they could recall the shared feelings of their rapport by repeating the coos they both expressed during their mutual experience. They might evoke the past situation like an inside joke no one else shared. Situations that employed mutually recognized sounds to re-member a literal, shared experience may have arrived as the first abstract constructions of human speech.
Searching for examples of this in my own experiential database has somehow brought my brother's dogs next door to mind, and what I remember them howling in agony over. The only incidents that come to mind are their reaction to sirens. Sometime, confusingly, distant sirens I can't hear yet. Occasionally the security alarms go off at the Moose club building about three hundred yards away and all the dogs in the rural neighborhood go nuts.
When the dogs get old and go off to be alone and die by themselves, they don't make any noise. My brother has to go out into the woods and find them. He calls to them to get a clue about where they may be hiding. Sometime I help him look for them, because they might have gone deaf or have lost other of their senses in their canine dotage, and can't find their way back to his house because they've lost their sense of smell or hearing. That's how dogs navigate. They can't think things through using reason or logic of any order. I invoke the fifth on whether that's true or no.
At first, when I began to contemplate the saying "Speech is mind. Mind is speech.", females giving birth came to mind. They might have uttered noises other women who have experienced giving birth could identify with. I watched a TV documentary about an American Indian "birthing place".
This purported birthing place was a location the paleontologists claim was a remote nook away from the main camp where pregnant women went to give birth. There were lots of supporting petroglyphs in this area. More interestingly, there were special grooves and recesses in the sandstone cliff walls that appeared to serve as handles or gripping places on the rock walls for the women to grab hold of while they were trying to push the baby out.
I was there when my second wife delivered our two daughters. She was determined to have the girls by natural childbirth without taking any drugs to help with the pain (which the LaMaze Method resists calling it). She was "toughing it out" until the baby started crowning and she was wheeled into the delivery room.
The hospital had several delivery rooms and a couple of them had young black women in them. They didn't be waiting for the crowning to be put there. They were screaming their ass off when the contractions came. Not my lady. She didn't have permission. Screeching in pain just didn't run in her family. Aries mother.
When I heard the totally acceptable screaming from the other delivery rooms I realized somehow that my wife merely needed permission to do it, and she could experience the relief such a rude racket might bring.
As soon as I told her in no uncertain terms that I had such authority over her mother's disciplined upbringing to give her permission to act un-lady-like, she started muttering in with a low rumbling noise at first. Her rude muttering soon exploded into a raunchy, uncool primal screaming of the most invigorating kind.
She didn't hold back until she heard her baby girl's first screams of undignified indignation. Then, hearing her, she followed the sound to it's source and laid eyes on her for the first time. These memories are all I have left of any of them. Claiming that I was there for them then is all I'm allowed.
Many people seem to conclude that my life means nothing beyond that of being a crude provocateur, and they're right, as far as they can "see" it. My authority to give people permission to do what they don't have a framework for invoking on their own forces a compassion that hurts people when both of us realize it ain't my doing.
The truth for me only ex-is-t in the specious present, but maybe empathy for shared experiences ushered in the me-and-thee-ing that eventually came around to have meaning. YMMV.
❦
I read all 114 sayings in the Gospel of Thomas twice this morning. Earlier, I could have sworn there was at least one saying that specifically mentions suffering. I was wrong. It isn't mentioned in the Davies translation. My wastrel's search for the origins of human speech is speculative arrogance. Why would I not? Keeping to my weird habits I've used the Davies version of the saying exclusively since I subscribed to the GoT e-mail discussion group.
Choosing one translated version of any holy book works for me. I used and studied the Wilhelm/Baynes translation of the I Ching for a long time. I read the James Legge classical Sinologist's translation previously, but it didn't seem to have a path with heart for me. I never used any other I Ching translations although many more became available over the next thirty-odd years. Too much information confuses my goals for studying such devices.
Besides, I believe in magic and fate and kismet and myths and fairy tales. I hate being confused by facts. Facticities (cities built from presumed facts/paradise/heaven/utopia/nuclear bombs) are for sissies who have no imagination or creativity.
Acquiring a horde of pertinent facts don't make anybody immortal. Facts' priesthood don't enter their abstractly constructed paradise, and they don't let anyone else in there either. It's spiritual extortion plain and simple. "Hell no, I won't go! Hell no, I won't go! Hell no..."
Sayings #68 and #69 in the Gospel of Thomas address persecution, but the term "suffering" is not specifically mentioned. I am finds itself thinking about physical suffering of the kind that would cause people to moan in distress. To utter stuff to indicate pain or perhaps even ecstasy. Perhaps both, Ecstagony! What's not to like about puling in hard-earned joy over finding food or water after a drought. "We're saved! Thank God Almighty, we're saved!"
It has crossed my mind several times recently that human speech uttered in pain or happiness might be involuntarily shared during a special empathetical moment like what might transpire between a new mother and her midwife cooing over the sight of a newborn. Deliberately re-member-ing such a share event by uttering the same sounds that happened in the past might be considered a primal form of human speech.
Perhaps later they could recall the shared feelings of their rapport by repeating the coos they both expressed during their mutual experience. They might evoke the past situation like an inside joke no one else shared. Situations that employed mutually recognized sounds to re-member a literal, shared experience may have arrived as the first abstract constructions of human speech.
Searching for examples of this in my own experiential database has somehow brought my brother's dogs next door to mind, and what I remember them howling in agony over. The only incidents that come to mind are their reaction to sirens. Sometime, confusingly, distant sirens I can't hear yet. Occasionally the security alarms go off at the Moose club building about three hundred yards away and all the dogs in the rural neighborhood go nuts.
When the dogs get old and go off to be alone and die by themselves, they don't make any noise. My brother has to go out into the woods and find them. He calls to them to get a clue about where they may be hiding. Sometime I help him look for them, because they might have gone deaf or have lost other of their senses in their canine dotage, and can't find their way back to his house because they've lost their sense of smell or hearing. That's how dogs navigate. They can't think things through using reason or logic of any order. I invoke the fifth on whether that's true or no.
At first, when I began to contemplate the saying "Speech is mind. Mind is speech.", females giving birth came to mind. They might have uttered noises other women who have experienced giving birth could identify with. I watched a TV documentary about an American Indian "birthing place".
This purported birthing place was a location the paleontologists claim was a remote nook away from the main camp where pregnant women went to give birth. There were lots of supporting petroglyphs in this area. More interestingly, there were special grooves and recesses in the sandstone cliff walls that appeared to serve as handles or gripping places on the rock walls for the women to grab hold of while they were trying to push the baby out.
I was there when my second wife delivered our two daughters. She was determined to have the girls by natural childbirth without taking any drugs to help with the pain (which the LaMaze Method resists calling it). She was "toughing it out" until the baby started crowning and she was wheeled into the delivery room.
The hospital had several delivery rooms and a couple of them had young black women in them. They didn't be waiting for the crowning to be put there. They were screaming their ass off when the contractions came. Not my lady. She didn't have permission. Screeching in pain just didn't run in her family. Aries mother.
When I heard the totally acceptable screaming from the other delivery rooms I realized somehow that my wife merely needed permission to do it, and she could experience the relief such a rude racket might bring.
As soon as I told her in no uncertain terms that I had such authority over her mother's disciplined upbringing to give her permission to act un-lady-like, she started muttering in with a low rumbling noise at first. Her rude muttering soon exploded into a raunchy, uncool primal screaming of the most invigorating kind.
She didn't hold back until she heard her baby girl's first screams of undignified indignation. Then, hearing her, she followed the sound to it's source and laid eyes on her for the first time. These memories are all I have left of any of them. Claiming that I was there for them then is all I'm allowed.
Many people seem to conclude that my life means nothing beyond that of being a crude provocateur, and they're right, as far as they can "see" it. My authority to give people permission to do what they don't have a framework for invoking on their own forces a compassion that hurts people when both of us realize it ain't my doing.
The truth for me only ex-is-t in the specious present, but maybe empathy for shared experiences ushered in the me-and-thee-ing that eventually came around to have meaning. YMMV.
❦
Love The One You're With
❧
"Stars act like we would, better than anybody else we know."
The quote above is mine. It came to mind ready-to-roll. I kept it in the Header at the top of the page for a month or so. It seemed so inappropriate there that place alone caused me to consider it's meaning. Today, I couldn't stand it anymore, so I removed it from it's lofty dominion and put it back here in the cosmic soup.
The Header of this blog is interesting to play around with. For one thing, it's easy to get to in order to play around with it. Not only did I remove the "Stars" quote, I changed other parts in some lame attempt to stop making tossed word salad.
"Tossed word salad" is not my original descriptor. I stole it from one of my most influential mentors, Milton Erickson, now deceased at least a decade. He used that term to describe the confusing speech of one of his patients during his internship to specialize in psychiatry in a mental hospital.
The patient's garbled speech actually represented the state of his confused mind. Erickson created a simile that he called "tossed word salad" to talk back to the patient, instead of employing the usual medical lingo he had previously gotten from the other doctors there at the asylum.
When "Uncle Miltie" (Milton Erickson's follower's nickname for him) started talking jibber jabber right back at him it caught him off guard, Erickson wrote in his memoirs that by using his confrontational method the patient began to realize what he himself must "sound like" to other people.
Erickson merely provided him with a mirror image of himself that allowed him to find his own way back home, and three months later he was released from the asylum on his own recognizance. I found a scratchy video of the old master at work. The patience he displays in helping the subject learn how to enter trance is remarkable:
http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=2228736059638306762#
Finding the video on the internet surprised me. I really hadn't thought to search for whatever might be found in regard to Erickson. Without realizing it in the short time we spent together, he refocused my goals in life. He was so skillful in doing it, it took me twenty-odd years to figure out what had happened.
Watching the video (which takes a real trooper to do) brought back memories of how long it takes for people to learn that it's okay for them to enter trance. They also have to learn how to do it by observing how they can respond to the hypnotist and go even deeper.
It took me a long time to understand what being in a deep, somnambulistic trance is like well enough for me to realize I was really in hypnosis. I had been in deep trance many times when I didn't realize the signs and omens of me being there.
Then, one afternoon at an NLP convention in Virginia Beach, Virginia, a professional hypnotist who operated his own hypnosis school in the same area, demonstrated his technique by hypnotizing the entire audience, including me. He was also very patient and redundant and took about an hour or more to lead us to a really deep place. He somehow addressed us individually find the clues and cues we each personally needed to walk the walk and talk the talk with somnambulism.
Even this professional hypnotist was impressed with himself afterward. He admitted that hypnotizing 200 hypnotists was a inspiring challenge. A person needs a framework for perceiving those clues that they're in deep trance. They have to find their own inner system of personal insights about letting it happen for themselves, because life itself hypnotizes everyone a lot, and it helps to know at least part of the time.
I'm convinced a person has to realize when they're in hypnosis via some imposed framework for recognizing when they're in state or they never will know for sure when it happens in some mundane situation. Once done, however, it gets scary to recognize how often it transpires on it's own terms.
Children can easily be seen staring at some event they're attempting imitate as if they were alone with no one watching. They practically suck the new world in with self-hypnosis. Abandoning the sensory dimension for a dynamic, ongoing exclusive focus is a learned trait. It's also a description of the hypnotic state.
❦
"Stars act like we would, better than anybody else we know."
The quote above is mine. It came to mind ready-to-roll. I kept it in the Header at the top of the page for a month or so. It seemed so inappropriate there that place alone caused me to consider it's meaning. Today, I couldn't stand it anymore, so I removed it from it's lofty dominion and put it back here in the cosmic soup.
The Header of this blog is interesting to play around with. For one thing, it's easy to get to in order to play around with it. Not only did I remove the "Stars" quote, I changed other parts in some lame attempt to stop making tossed word salad.
"Tossed word salad" is not my original descriptor. I stole it from one of my most influential mentors, Milton Erickson, now deceased at least a decade. He used that term to describe the confusing speech of one of his patients during his internship to specialize in psychiatry in a mental hospital.
The patient's garbled speech actually represented the state of his confused mind. Erickson created a simile that he called "tossed word salad" to talk back to the patient, instead of employing the usual medical lingo he had previously gotten from the other doctors there at the asylum.
When "Uncle Miltie" (Milton Erickson's follower's nickname for him) started talking jibber jabber right back at him it caught him off guard, Erickson wrote in his memoirs that by using his confrontational method the patient began to realize what he himself must "sound like" to other people.
Erickson merely provided him with a mirror image of himself that allowed him to find his own way back home, and three months later he was released from the asylum on his own recognizance. I found a scratchy video of the old master at work. The patience he displays in helping the subject learn how to enter trance is remarkable:
http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=2228736059638306762#
Finding the video on the internet surprised me. I really hadn't thought to search for whatever might be found in regard to Erickson. Without realizing it in the short time we spent together, he refocused my goals in life. He was so skillful in doing it, it took me twenty-odd years to figure out what had happened.
Watching the video (which takes a real trooper to do) brought back memories of how long it takes for people to learn that it's okay for them to enter trance. They also have to learn how to do it by observing how they can respond to the hypnotist and go even deeper.
It took me a long time to understand what being in a deep, somnambulistic trance is like well enough for me to realize I was really in hypnosis. I had been in deep trance many times when I didn't realize the signs and omens of me being there.
Then, one afternoon at an NLP convention in Virginia Beach, Virginia, a professional hypnotist who operated his own hypnosis school in the same area, demonstrated his technique by hypnotizing the entire audience, including me. He was also very patient and redundant and took about an hour or more to lead us to a really deep place. He somehow addressed us individually find the clues and cues we each personally needed to walk the walk and talk the talk with somnambulism.
Even this professional hypnotist was impressed with himself afterward. He admitted that hypnotizing 200 hypnotists was a inspiring challenge. A person needs a framework for perceiving those clues that they're in deep trance. They have to find their own inner system of personal insights about letting it happen for themselves, because life itself hypnotizes everyone a lot, and it helps to know at least part of the time.
I'm convinced a person has to realize when they're in hypnosis via some imposed framework for recognizing when they're in state or they never will know for sure when it happens in some mundane situation. Once done, however, it gets scary to recognize how often it transpires on it's own terms.
Children can easily be seen staring at some event they're attempting imitate as if they were alone with no one watching. They practically suck the new world in with self-hypnosis. Abandoning the sensory dimension for a dynamic, ongoing exclusive focus is a learned trait. It's also a description of the hypnotic state.
❦
Friday, November 19, 2010
One's Mind Is Created By One's Speech
❧
The "news" offers nothing new anymore except the latest body count of who-got-murdered-by-whom since yesterday's body count was refigured to include the murders that went on in the world where it was still dark during the last report.
The reason the news is not new anymore is due to the lack of originality. Humans die for the same old sad reasons they've always died, and the shocked witnesses (or lack thereof) report the deaths using the same language as the witnesses did the day before and the day before that.
Why do all these people think the crimes that happen in their neighborhood are any more criminal than what they watched on TV last night? It seems like the only real difference is that it went on in some other neighborhood as the world turns wobbling away from the Sun.
It took a long period of time for me to mentally configure an abstract zodiac in my mind's eye via speech in order to have it there for my own use without printed or digital images to calculate from.
At best, my abstract construction of a astrological zodiac was haphazardly inculcated and not done according to some precise astrological rules to guide me through the process. I sort of made it up as I went along. Why would I not? Nobody knows what I got in the more of me than they can "see", even if I tell them to their face.
"It's my party, and I'll cry if I want to.
You would cry too if it happened to you..."
~ Sung by Lesley Gore
In my opinion, astrology is a systematic approach to remembering abstract constructs. It's a system of associative "pegs" a person can "hang" their version of a specific event upon. It's not about some philosophical or scientific irrefutable truth, but organizes the more of me according to the five senses of perception.
This understanding of how astrology operates as a memory system wasn't derived from my decades long study of astrology itself, but from my study of another system created by Dr. Milton Erickson called Ethical Hypnosis, which was then adapted to another system called Neurolinguistic Programming by Richard Bandler and friends.
The part of Ethical Hypnosis and NLP that completed the circle for me about memory systems was how they pointed out that people's memories are stored in their auras according to their favorite sensory modality. I had not previously considered that I might have a favorite way of perceiving and storing memories of the ongoing events of the world around me.
NLP provides a framework for figuring out how this might be recognized by myself and others. We betray ourselves by our everyday speech. We say things like, "I see what you mean." (visual) or "I hear what you're saying." (auditory) or "I smell a rat." (smell and taste) or "That hurts my feelings" (kinesthetic).
Hypnosis can provide a portal for realizing that humans actually remember everything that happens around them for very long periods of time, but not all of it is retained consciously except perhaps for one's favorite sensory modality, and not even that for long.
An insightful, thoroughly trained NLP practitioner can elicit the unconscious data from the other senses as well as from the favored sense. That's how they perform miracles. They help people to re-me the missing parts so that the subject gets "the rest of the story".
Granted, the memories people acquire are the components of the "more of me" than the other can "see", but that "more" still has to be related or and associated with the me that its more of. Astrology is the most ancient system for integrating the experiential database of all the five senses into a whole (holy) body of work sometime defined as gnosis.
The art of statecraft has gotten more and more useful throughout my adult life. I've literally created unwanted enemies by pointing out that most individuals only know a little more than a fifth of what they gnow. What I-am-is saying is that they don't need to know what they gnow, I do, and that may not exactly true either.
With my question being: What or why or how does it benefit a person to possess or be possessed by a body of knowledge no other person can ken except by interpretation and projection? I perceive the world through my five senses just like everybody else that have five working sensory modalities. Some people have less than five senses for various reasons.
Since I can only perceive what I "think" is over there in the world around me, and if I "think" differently than I personally ideate and label the objects of the world, then the world changes to accommodate my change of heart or mind, and every other person on earth has to interpret how I speak my mind or from my heart to mean what they would have meant if they speak the sa-me words.
Since nobody knows what I have in my mind and heart but me, and since I don't know what the other has in their hearts and minds, nobody knows anything more than what they individually decide, and so the entirety of all of our me-more-s is useless for re-ordering the world. This "body" of experiential knowledge is merely a carcass.
56 Jesus said, "Whoever has come to know the world has discovered a carcass, and whoever has discovered a carcass, of that person the world is not worthy."
http://users.misericordia.edu//davies/thomas/Trans.htm
❦
The "news" offers nothing new anymore except the latest body count of who-got-murdered-by-whom since yesterday's body count was refigured to include the murders that went on in the world where it was still dark during the last report.
The reason the news is not new anymore is due to the lack of originality. Humans die for the same old sad reasons they've always died, and the shocked witnesses (or lack thereof) report the deaths using the same language as the witnesses did the day before and the day before that.
Why do all these people think the crimes that happen in their neighborhood are any more criminal than what they watched on TV last night? It seems like the only real difference is that it went on in some other neighborhood as the world turns wobbling away from the Sun.
It took a long period of time for me to mentally configure an abstract zodiac in my mind's eye via speech in order to have it there for my own use without printed or digital images to calculate from.
At best, my abstract construction of a astrological zodiac was haphazardly inculcated and not done according to some precise astrological rules to guide me through the process. I sort of made it up as I went along. Why would I not? Nobody knows what I got in the more of me than they can "see", even if I tell them to their face.
"It's my party, and I'll cry if I want to.
You would cry too if it happened to you..."
~ Sung by Lesley Gore
In my opinion, astrology is a systematic approach to remembering abstract constructs. It's a system of associative "pegs" a person can "hang" their version of a specific event upon. It's not about some philosophical or scientific irrefutable truth, but organizes the more of me according to the five senses of perception.
This understanding of how astrology operates as a memory system wasn't derived from my decades long study of astrology itself, but from my study of another system created by Dr. Milton Erickson called Ethical Hypnosis, which was then adapted to another system called Neurolinguistic Programming by Richard Bandler and friends.
The part of Ethical Hypnosis and NLP that completed the circle for me about memory systems was how they pointed out that people's memories are stored in their auras according to their favorite sensory modality. I had not previously considered that I might have a favorite way of perceiving and storing memories of the ongoing events of the world around me.
NLP provides a framework for figuring out how this might be recognized by myself and others. We betray ourselves by our everyday speech. We say things like, "I see what you mean." (visual) or "I hear what you're saying." (auditory) or "I smell a rat." (smell and taste) or "That hurts my feelings" (kinesthetic).
Hypnosis can provide a portal for realizing that humans actually remember everything that happens around them for very long periods of time, but not all of it is retained consciously except perhaps for one's favorite sensory modality, and not even that for long.
An insightful, thoroughly trained NLP practitioner can elicit the unconscious data from the other senses as well as from the favored sense. That's how they perform miracles. They help people to re-me the missing parts so that the subject gets "the rest of the story".
Granted, the memories people acquire are the components of the "more of me" than the other can "see", but that "more" still has to be related or and associated with the me that its more of. Astrology is the most ancient system for integrating the experiential database of all the five senses into a whole (holy) body of work sometime defined as gnosis.
The art of statecraft has gotten more and more useful throughout my adult life. I've literally created unwanted enemies by pointing out that most individuals only know a little more than a fifth of what they gnow. What I-am-is saying is that they don't need to know what they gnow, I do, and that may not exactly true either.
With my question being: What or why or how does it benefit a person to possess or be possessed by a body of knowledge no other person can ken except by interpretation and projection? I perceive the world through my five senses just like everybody else that have five working sensory modalities. Some people have less than five senses for various reasons.
Since I can only perceive what I "think" is over there in the world around me, and if I "think" differently than I personally ideate and label the objects of the world, then the world changes to accommodate my change of heart or mind, and every other person on earth has to interpret how I speak my mind or from my heart to mean what they would have meant if they speak the sa-me words.
Since nobody knows what I have in my mind and heart but me, and since I don't know what the other has in their hearts and minds, nobody knows anything more than what they individually decide, and so the entirety of all of our me-more-s is useless for re-ordering the world. This "body" of experiential knowledge is merely a carcass.
56 Jesus said, "Whoever has come to know the world has discovered a carcass, and whoever has discovered a carcass, of that person the world is not worthy."
http://users.misericordia.edu//davies/thomas/Trans.htm
❦
Thursday, November 18, 2010
Thor's Day's UnWholy Temptations
❧
There was something I didn't know that was holding me back from what I didn't currently understand I needed. I had surrendered all of the attributes I received from my family, and rebuked my foolishness for holding on to what I was taught sustained me, and yet the transition I sought through spiritual questing still evaded me. I am is pretty sure it committed myself to the state hospital for the insane to finish what was left of my father's son off. Good riddance.
In the past, I've written that I committed myself to the nut house forty odd years ago to successfully discover what "crazy" really is. I still believe it was somewhat for that somewhat sociopathic reason, but there was another purpose for performing such a self-murdering faux pas,
Even as I went through the motions of allowing the legal arrangements to be made in my nayme, I sort of knew that it would eliminate any chance at all that I could follow the path of my caretakers to be academically brilliant in order to impress humans instead of gods.
Committing myself to the insane asylum was the final act of a sojourn I'd been on since puberty to find true spiritual guidance for what was otherwise, to me, a disgusting lifetime of being a patsy. I'd looked around. I was a bright little boy. It became easier and less avoidable to grasp that the adults around me (that I was encouraged as a child to emulate) were hypocrites of the lowest order.
They preached one thing and did another. Hypocrisy was the one word I learned during my pubescent years that tilted the scales of justice for me. The "law" my mentors were teaching me to obey seemed to be subject to their own snickering ridicule.
That is, when they weren't giving themselves airs about their immodest superiority, in order to suggest smugly that if I really wanted to be successful in life like they were, then I would do what they said do and not what they did. I was a very confused kid. I'm a confused adult too. I cope with confusion with the best of them. '-)
It was only when I read the Jesus saying below that I realized that by running away from the role my parents and other mentors had insisted upon, that I had instinctively chosen a path with heart:
55 Jesus said, "Whoever does not hate father and mother cannot be my disciple, and whoever does not hate brothers and sisters, and carry the cross as I do, will not be worthy of me."
http://users.misericordia.edu//davies/thomas/Trans.htm
It was by fighting against becoming a respected member of society that I did the right thing, but even now nobody believes that destroying any chance I ever might have at attaining social recognition as a "good man" could I have ever received my remembering vision.
Receiving that vision was the beginning of living a magical life. These days I call that event by the term "bejinning", because it was only after remembering all that my me had ever been since it's arrival on the planet Earth, this time, was I able to write the poetry that revealed my true fate.
Ecstagony
Caught eternally between
the love of my hating,
and the hate of my loving,
I sit unconcerned,
alone
in my reflection of fear.
Hoping with the de-liberation
of hard-earned patience
for the time to come
of my final deliverance
from the agony and ecstasy
of making believe
the images of my imagination
will set me free
from the ever clinging fate
of dualistic opposites.
Realization is always
one step beyond knowing
the Unknown.
October 3, 1971
Only this morning did I write about how suffering created speech, and speech created mind. I wrote as an example about the mourning so-me women do when they give birth to a child. Classically, they curse the man who caused them to experience this woeful event. Aaaiiiyyeeeeee!
I like to hyphenate words to explore them phonically (like the Phoenicians did?). The suffering a woman endures when the baby crowns just before final delivery can be an agonizing experience to listen to them. Having a baby seems very undignified from an external point of view. It does thangs to the a female's id. It changes a woe-to-man-s (woman's) perspective of her own damned, de-virginized flesh.
If flesh is created by suffering, then, is spirit created by joy? This may seem strange to the uninitiated, but for those who have studied the Gnostic sayings it's written in the Gospel of Thomas in very lucid terms:
29 Jesus said, "If the flesh came into being because of spirit, that is a marvel, but if spirit came into being because of the body, that is a marvel of marvels.
Yet I marvel at how this great wealth has come to dwell in this poverty."
http://users.misericordia.edu//davies/thomas/Trans.htm
It's readily apparent to me that the great majority of the humans I encounter would think they were crazy to be writing tossed word salad like the statements above. I don't blame them a bit. They might not be able to live with themselves as a wacked-out nincompoop, but they've never had their me-more-s reframed like I have, so it's just as well they're not tempted. '-)
❦
There was something I didn't know that was holding me back from what I didn't currently understand I needed. I had surrendered all of the attributes I received from my family, and rebuked my foolishness for holding on to what I was taught sustained me, and yet the transition I sought through spiritual questing still evaded me. I am is pretty sure it committed myself to the state hospital for the insane to finish what was left of my father's son off. Good riddance.
In the past, I've written that I committed myself to the nut house forty odd years ago to successfully discover what "crazy" really is. I still believe it was somewhat for that somewhat sociopathic reason, but there was another purpose for performing such a self-murdering faux pas,
Even as I went through the motions of allowing the legal arrangements to be made in my nayme, I sort of knew that it would eliminate any chance at all that I could follow the path of my caretakers to be academically brilliant in order to impress humans instead of gods.
Committing myself to the insane asylum was the final act of a sojourn I'd been on since puberty to find true spiritual guidance for what was otherwise, to me, a disgusting lifetime of being a patsy. I'd looked around. I was a bright little boy. It became easier and less avoidable to grasp that the adults around me (that I was encouraged as a child to emulate) were hypocrites of the lowest order.
They preached one thing and did another. Hypocrisy was the one word I learned during my pubescent years that tilted the scales of justice for me. The "law" my mentors were teaching me to obey seemed to be subject to their own snickering ridicule.
That is, when they weren't giving themselves airs about their immodest superiority, in order to suggest smugly that if I really wanted to be successful in life like they were, then I would do what they said do and not what they did. I was a very confused kid. I'm a confused adult too. I cope with confusion with the best of them. '-)
It was only when I read the Jesus saying below that I realized that by running away from the role my parents and other mentors had insisted upon, that I had instinctively chosen a path with heart:
55 Jesus said, "Whoever does not hate father and mother cannot be my disciple, and whoever does not hate brothers and sisters, and carry the cross as I do, will not be worthy of me."
http://users.misericordia.edu//davies/thomas/Trans.htm
It was by fighting against becoming a respected member of society that I did the right thing, but even now nobody believes that destroying any chance I ever might have at attaining social recognition as a "good man" could I have ever received my remembering vision.
Receiving that vision was the beginning of living a magical life. These days I call that event by the term "bejinning", because it was only after remembering all that my me had ever been since it's arrival on the planet Earth, this time, was I able to write the poetry that revealed my true fate.
Ecstagony
Caught eternally between
the love of my hating,
and the hate of my loving,
I sit unconcerned,
alone
in my reflection of fear.
Hoping with the de-liberation
of hard-earned patience
for the time to come
of my final deliverance
from the agony and ecstasy
of making believe
the images of my imagination
will set me free
from the ever clinging fate
of dualistic opposites.
Realization is always
one step beyond knowing
the Unknown.
October 3, 1971
Only this morning did I write about how suffering created speech, and speech created mind. I wrote as an example about the mourning so-me women do when they give birth to a child. Classically, they curse the man who caused them to experience this woeful event. Aaaiiiyyeeeeee!
I like to hyphenate words to explore them phonically (like the Phoenicians did?). The suffering a woman endures when the baby crowns just before final delivery can be an agonizing experience to listen to them. Having a baby seems very undignified from an external point of view. It does thangs to the a female's id. It changes a woe-to-man-s (woman's) perspective of her own damned, de-virginized flesh.
If flesh is created by suffering, then, is spirit created by joy? This may seem strange to the uninitiated, but for those who have studied the Gnostic sayings it's written in the Gospel of Thomas in very lucid terms:
29 Jesus said, "If the flesh came into being because of spirit, that is a marvel, but if spirit came into being because of the body, that is a marvel of marvels.
Yet I marvel at how this great wealth has come to dwell in this poverty."
http://users.misericordia.edu//davies/thomas/Trans.htm
It's readily apparent to me that the great majority of the humans I encounter would think they were crazy to be writing tossed word salad like the statements above. I don't blame them a bit. They might not be able to live with themselves as a wacked-out nincompoop, but they've never had their me-more-s reframed like I have, so it's just as well they're not tempted. '-)
❦
Wednesday, November 17, 2010
1Password, The Wise Choice For Security
❧
My brother has been urging me to change the master password on my password software program named 1Password. Only a couple of people including my brother knew what my master password was. Obviously, I trusted both of them to not "mess with my junk." '-)
Yesterday I opened the preferences application of 1Password to figure how to change the master password, and very quickly spotted a button there labeled "Change Master Password". So far, so good. Even I could figure that out. I clicked on that button and it produced a dialog box in which I was asked to type in my old master password. So, I did.
Beneath the space for my old password was two more dialog boxes to fill in. You know the drill. The top one was for the new password and the one below it asked for me to repeat the new password as usual.
I decided to use the program's password generator to come up with a new master password, so I booted up the generator program and chose what seemed to be an easy to remember combination of numbers and letters I figured might stymy the bad guys, and wrote it down on a panel for such things behind my computer, and then hit Enter.
That was a mistake. I had written down the new master password in two places. I thought I had acted with the proper caution in such matters. I still don't know what went wrong, but the program wouldn't take what I entered as the new master password to open the program. This development was scary. I had hand-written copies of all the passwords inside the very program I had locked myself out of, so there shouldn't be a problem. Right?
Nope. Not right. My password to my bank account didn't work after I'd typed it in the old way by hand. Normally, 1Password would have filled in the user name and password for me, and opened my bank account in seconds. Entering that info the old fashioned way didn't work, probably because I couldn't read my own lousy handwriting.
Now I began to worry and anticipate all sorts of hassles I might run into if couldn't get into my bank account. I hate going to the physical bank building anymore. I have to drive over there, and get out of my car and physically walk inside. Then, I have to look people in the eye that will soon know exactly how poor I am is. Bummer. Messes with my swagger.
I had to take unfamiliar steps. I wrote an e-mail to the 1Password support group and asked what I should do. They had helped me pretty quick earlier when I first bought the program. Then, to waste some time, I drove over to a nearby strip mall and shopped for a new pair of scissors to give them an opportunity to write me back. Sure enough, when I got back home, there was an e-mail from one of their tech guys.
He carefully pointed out that they don't have access to anybody's master password, and there isn't any back doors he could use. That would make the program vulnerable to intruders. Next, however, he told me to try something that might work. I didn't understand at first, and then an LED came on and suddenly I did, and when I followed his suggestions the program opened right up. Hurrah!
After being online since 1992 I've grown to realize the importance of a good password program that could provide and keep up with some fairly complicated passwords. I was still using the very first password my first ISP provided me with for just about every site I subscribed to. Also, I've lost or forgotten my share of passwords. I must have read a hundred times in security articles that this was a stupid thing to do.
Since I'd previously read a couple of positive reviews about 1Password, a software program for keeping all my passwords (and other living things) inside the program's encrypted folder behind one master password, I began warming up to the idea of using this program
I sent an e-mail to Agile Web Solutions up in Canada just to see if anybody was home and to find out if they'd write back. I didn't wanna get mixed up with no slackers when it comes to passwords and encryption. They wrote back in a couple of hours and addressed my concerns briefly, so I decided to buy into their promises.
This happened during the time Apple was coming out with Snow Leopard in 64-bits. I was chomping the bit for this to happen. I don't know much about computers, but I read a lot. I read a lot about 64-bit chips and how they needed a 64-bit operating system in order to use a lotta DRAM memory.
Previous to Apple coming out with Snow Leopard I had a Mac Mini and a 32-bit CPU. I could have upgraded to a 64-bit core duo chip, but there were other limitations with the Mac Mini I didn't wanna deal with, and even though springing for a new computer wasn't in my near future plans, I decided to buy a new iMac that came with Snow Leopard already loaded.
Having the new iMac was the real impetus for my deciding to go ahead and buy my own license for 1Password:
http://agilewebsolutions.com/company
The company site stated back then that they didn't have the 64-bit version of 1Passport ready for prime time, but they had a beta thing going on, and the 32-bit version still worked in Snow Leopard. Since I had gone this far I decided to pay them their asking price, downloaded the beta program, and hoped for both our sakes they worked things out.
Fairly soon Agile had the gold version for Snow Leopard put together, and I've received lots of timely upgrades. The program has just gotten mo' bettah! There is some free software I've read about that does something similar. Normally, if it didn't matter that much, I might use freeware, but this is about real security.
I don't mind paying for software this useful when it does as promised. What's not to like about about a company that supports their product so vigorously. This program does the trick. Highly recommended.
❦
My brother has been urging me to change the master password on my password software program named 1Password. Only a couple of people including my brother knew what my master password was. Obviously, I trusted both of them to not "mess with my junk." '-)
Yesterday I opened the preferences application of 1Password to figure how to change the master password, and very quickly spotted a button there labeled "Change Master Password". So far, so good. Even I could figure that out. I clicked on that button and it produced a dialog box in which I was asked to type in my old master password. So, I did.
Beneath the space for my old password was two more dialog boxes to fill in. You know the drill. The top one was for the new password and the one below it asked for me to repeat the new password as usual.
I decided to use the program's password generator to come up with a new master password, so I booted up the generator program and chose what seemed to be an easy to remember combination of numbers and letters I figured might stymy the bad guys, and wrote it down on a panel for such things behind my computer, and then hit Enter.
That was a mistake. I had written down the new master password in two places. I thought I had acted with the proper caution in such matters. I still don't know what went wrong, but the program wouldn't take what I entered as the new master password to open the program. This development was scary. I had hand-written copies of all the passwords inside the very program I had locked myself out of, so there shouldn't be a problem. Right?
Nope. Not right. My password to my bank account didn't work after I'd typed it in the old way by hand. Normally, 1Password would have filled in the user name and password for me, and opened my bank account in seconds. Entering that info the old fashioned way didn't work, probably because I couldn't read my own lousy handwriting.
Now I began to worry and anticipate all sorts of hassles I might run into if couldn't get into my bank account. I hate going to the physical bank building anymore. I have to drive over there, and get out of my car and physically walk inside. Then, I have to look people in the eye that will soon know exactly how poor I am is. Bummer. Messes with my swagger.
I had to take unfamiliar steps. I wrote an e-mail to the 1Password support group and asked what I should do. They had helped me pretty quick earlier when I first bought the program. Then, to waste some time, I drove over to a nearby strip mall and shopped for a new pair of scissors to give them an opportunity to write me back. Sure enough, when I got back home, there was an e-mail from one of their tech guys.
He carefully pointed out that they don't have access to anybody's master password, and there isn't any back doors he could use. That would make the program vulnerable to intruders. Next, however, he told me to try something that might work. I didn't understand at first, and then an LED came on and suddenly I did, and when I followed his suggestions the program opened right up. Hurrah!
After being online since 1992 I've grown to realize the importance of a good password program that could provide and keep up with some fairly complicated passwords. I was still using the very first password my first ISP provided me with for just about every site I subscribed to. Also, I've lost or forgotten my share of passwords. I must have read a hundred times in security articles that this was a stupid thing to do.
Since I'd previously read a couple of positive reviews about 1Password, a software program for keeping all my passwords (and other living things) inside the program's encrypted folder behind one master password, I began warming up to the idea of using this program
I sent an e-mail to Agile Web Solutions up in Canada just to see if anybody was home and to find out if they'd write back. I didn't wanna get mixed up with no slackers when it comes to passwords and encryption. They wrote back in a couple of hours and addressed my concerns briefly, so I decided to buy into their promises.
This happened during the time Apple was coming out with Snow Leopard in 64-bits. I was chomping the bit for this to happen. I don't know much about computers, but I read a lot. I read a lot about 64-bit chips and how they needed a 64-bit operating system in order to use a lotta DRAM memory.
Previous to Apple coming out with Snow Leopard I had a Mac Mini and a 32-bit CPU. I could have upgraded to a 64-bit core duo chip, but there were other limitations with the Mac Mini I didn't wanna deal with, and even though springing for a new computer wasn't in my near future plans, I decided to buy a new iMac that came with Snow Leopard already loaded.
Having the new iMac was the real impetus for my deciding to go ahead and buy my own license for 1Password:
http://agilewebsolutions.com/company
The company site stated back then that they didn't have the 64-bit version of 1Passport ready for prime time, but they had a beta thing going on, and the 32-bit version still worked in Snow Leopard. Since I had gone this far I decided to pay them their asking price, downloaded the beta program, and hoped for both our sakes they worked things out.
Fairly soon Agile had the gold version for Snow Leopard put together, and I've received lots of timely upgrades. The program has just gotten mo' bettah! There is some free software I've read about that does something similar. Normally, if it didn't matter that much, I might use freeware, but this is about real security.
I don't mind paying for software this useful when it does as promised. What's not to like about about a company that supports their product so vigorously. This program does the trick. Highly recommended.
❦
Doing What Comes Un-naturally
❧
The shallow trench my brother and I dug was easier when he hooked up the hard-pan buster to his tractor to put the ethernet cable underground. Before this happened I used a regular axe to chop a trench in the ground by hand until he showed up. I'm paying for that physical labor now even three days later.
At least, I hope that the pain I'm feeling in my back is due to the work I didn't have to do. The medicine I'm taking for the autoimmune diseases diagnosed has a reputation for destroying one's liver and sometimes the kidneys with long-term use.
I haven't been using the powerful prescription drugs for long. Not compared with the brother of my sister-in-law that she has moved next door to nurse since he started getting chemotherapy for fourth-stage throat cancer. He has been on them for over twelve years, and the drugs he's been taking for the rheumatoid arthritis bears some blame. I'm taking Milk Thistle concentrate in capsule form that's supposed to help clean the liver of such problems, but I'm drinking a couple of glasses of cheap wine each day, if not more, that is reputed to offset any good the drugs do.
Not only do I take Milk Thistle concentrate for my liver, but I take a fair number of supplements besides that. Concentrated fish oil. A large capsule that contains a combination of Acetyl L-Carnitine and Alpha Lipoic Acid a couple or three times a day. NAC (N-Acetyl Cysteine) is my favorite new supplement that is reputed to prevent dementia or at least stave it off a little longer.
Between the prescription drugs I take each day and the supplements I gulp down by the handful I sorta feel like a nut, but what I take is nothing compared to Kurzweil who has prophesied what he calls The Singularity:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Singularity_Is_Near
Kurzweil takes over a hundred supplements a day in the hope of surviving long enough for the technological advances he predicts to come into being. I may be too old for that to happen before I croak. Having been diagnosed with a plethora of autoimmune diseases already doesn't bode well for me surviving until 2045.
Yesterday I read in the news about the first stem cell procedure for the brain and Alzheimer's Syndrome taking place in England. The report stated that the doctors injected a man's own stem cells directly into his brain. That should prove interesting to keep an eye out for, but I ain't gwine bet the farm on this happening for me.
In the next few days I'm gonna terminate my home phone and DSL internet connection. I'll eventually get a cell phone that will allow both wirelessly. It never occurred to me until a friend pointed it out that humans themselves are wireless devices once the umbilical cord is cut. Life may imitate art, but technology imitates life. Why would it not?
Cutting off my telephone account incites a little nostalgia for me. I remember our family getting it's first hand-cranked telephone that was on a party line that anybody on that line could pick up and listen to the neighbors gossip. After all the technological changes that have happened since then it's not that difficult to imagine what might happen by the time 2045 rolls around.
❦
The shallow trench my brother and I dug was easier when he hooked up the hard-pan buster to his tractor to put the ethernet cable underground. Before this happened I used a regular axe to chop a trench in the ground by hand until he showed up. I'm paying for that physical labor now even three days later.
At least, I hope that the pain I'm feeling in my back is due to the work I didn't have to do. The medicine I'm taking for the autoimmune diseases diagnosed has a reputation for destroying one's liver and sometimes the kidneys with long-term use.
I haven't been using the powerful prescription drugs for long. Not compared with the brother of my sister-in-law that she has moved next door to nurse since he started getting chemotherapy for fourth-stage throat cancer. He has been on them for over twelve years, and the drugs he's been taking for the rheumatoid arthritis bears some blame. I'm taking Milk Thistle concentrate in capsule form that's supposed to help clean the liver of such problems, but I'm drinking a couple of glasses of cheap wine each day, if not more, that is reputed to offset any good the drugs do.
Not only do I take Milk Thistle concentrate for my liver, but I take a fair number of supplements besides that. Concentrated fish oil. A large capsule that contains a combination of Acetyl L-Carnitine and Alpha Lipoic Acid a couple or three times a day. NAC (N-Acetyl Cysteine) is my favorite new supplement that is reputed to prevent dementia or at least stave it off a little longer.
Between the prescription drugs I take each day and the supplements I gulp down by the handful I sorta feel like a nut, but what I take is nothing compared to Kurzweil who has prophesied what he calls The Singularity:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Singularity_Is_Near
Kurzweil takes over a hundred supplements a day in the hope of surviving long enough for the technological advances he predicts to come into being. I may be too old for that to happen before I croak. Having been diagnosed with a plethora of autoimmune diseases already doesn't bode well for me surviving until 2045.
Yesterday I read in the news about the first stem cell procedure for the brain and Alzheimer's Syndrome taking place in England. The report stated that the doctors injected a man's own stem cells directly into his brain. That should prove interesting to keep an eye out for, but I ain't gwine bet the farm on this happening for me.
In the next few days I'm gonna terminate my home phone and DSL internet connection. I'll eventually get a cell phone that will allow both wirelessly. It never occurred to me until a friend pointed it out that humans themselves are wireless devices once the umbilical cord is cut. Life may imitate art, but technology imitates life. Why would it not?
Cutting off my telephone account incites a little nostalgia for me. I remember our family getting it's first hand-cranked telephone that was on a party line that anybody on that line could pick up and listen to the neighbors gossip. After all the technological changes that have happened since then it's not that difficult to imagine what might happen by the time 2045 rolls around.
❦
Tuesday, November 16, 2010
Gone Are The Days
❧
The new State museum pisses me off. My complaint is probably my fault. I have cataracts in both eyes. On December 2nd I have an appointment to see the surgeon who will remove the cataracts and replace them with new lens. Maybe by spring of next year, should I live so long, I'll be able to view my old friends in a new light. Literally.
Thomas Cole was one of the Hudson River School of painters. I don't know the history too well. I do know that when I saw four of his paintings in the National Galleries in Washington, D.C., I embarrassed my second wife by suddenly weeping in a state of ecstasy in the middle of a room filled with other museum visitors. That's the only time that's happened.
Contrarily, I'm very pleased it did happen. It was the only way I felt I could have known how art captivates people in a very powerful way. I've caused that same ecstasy in other people with my poems, but I had to experience it myself to know that the emotional outpouring is entirely real.
Thomas Cole's painting in the new museum has such bad lighting that I can barely see the little strokes of red that set off an otherwise ordinary painting. I've been visiting that painting in the State art museum since I was twelve years old. I may have seen in the interim in between now and back then maybe a hundred times. That's easily accomplished in the sixty years that has passed since then.
I drove up to the capital basically just to get out of the house and into a new or different environment. I'm suffering a little relapse and the psoriasis that comes along with the rheumatoid arthritis is showing up on my feet. I've been experiencing some heart palpitations, but I think that comes from a cheap nasal inhaler I bought at Wal-Mart. Probably Chinese stuff. My nose is still bleeding a little two days later.
Another one of the reasons I drove up to the state capital was to sing the vowels along the way. Of all the chanting I've done using mantrums I've been taught from other cultures, and even the nursery rhymes I learned as a child, and the earliest prayers I learned ("Now I lay me down to sleep, I pray the Lord my soul to keep... "), singing the vowels work real well for me for calming down and connecting all the stray parts of myself together.
After I left the museum and drove to downtown Raleigh on the streets I knew in my youth I was just about to get on Interstate 40 to drive home when I saw a sign pointing to the State Farmers Market. I'd never been there although I have heard a lot about it. My sister-in-law next door goes there frequently, and has encouraged me to take a look.
There were lots of fresh vegetables all displayed in fine fashion, but not like the fancy fresh food markets I've seen in other places. No need here. Not enough competition to go to the trouble to put all those vegetables in neat pyramid stacks to show them off. I bought a couple of huge one-slice sandwich tomatoes like the ones I've never been able to grow myself.
On the way out of the market area I saw they had a large restaurant with lots of cars parked there. I was hungry, so I decided to go inside to eat. That's not as simple as it has been in the past. Mostly because I stopped eating gluten to see where that leads, but also because I've stopped eating dairy. I'm suspicious I may be lactose intolerant, and my fondness for sour cream on practically all the food I eat may be what leads to outbreaks of psoriasis.
The swollen red spots on my toes that I have previously figured to be a fungus infection ain't no fungus infection, but psoriasis. It comes along with the RA. No salve or medicine I've ever used on it to make it go away, made it go away. But, it does go away eventually. Now, I'm attempting to figure out what makes it bloom in the first place. It may or may not be lactose intolerance.
The real problem, as far as eating out is concerned is the gluten diet I've assumed. It prohibits any wheat products, and that indicates sandwich breads, so I'm stuck with finding something to eat in other than fast food joints where practically everything they offer is served on white bread.
I knew that when I bought those two huge tomatoes that would easily make four one-slice tomato sandwiches apiece. It's a nostalgic binge, and since that's so I would have to make them with slices of white bread and mayonnaise, salt and black pepper. No more and no less. That's how it's done. Well, in the past, that's how it was done. Tonight I just ate a couple of slices of tomato with salt and pepper and pretended it was just as good without the sliced bread. It isn't. '-)
❦
The new State museum pisses me off. My complaint is probably my fault. I have cataracts in both eyes. On December 2nd I have an appointment to see the surgeon who will remove the cataracts and replace them with new lens. Maybe by spring of next year, should I live so long, I'll be able to view my old friends in a new light. Literally.
Thomas Cole was one of the Hudson River School of painters. I don't know the history too well. I do know that when I saw four of his paintings in the National Galleries in Washington, D.C., I embarrassed my second wife by suddenly weeping in a state of ecstasy in the middle of a room filled with other museum visitors. That's the only time that's happened.
Contrarily, I'm very pleased it did happen. It was the only way I felt I could have known how art captivates people in a very powerful way. I've caused that same ecstasy in other people with my poems, but I had to experience it myself to know that the emotional outpouring is entirely real.
Thomas Cole's painting in the new museum has such bad lighting that I can barely see the little strokes of red that set off an otherwise ordinary painting. I've been visiting that painting in the State art museum since I was twelve years old. I may have seen in the interim in between now and back then maybe a hundred times. That's easily accomplished in the sixty years that has passed since then.
I drove up to the capital basically just to get out of the house and into a new or different environment. I'm suffering a little relapse and the psoriasis that comes along with the rheumatoid arthritis is showing up on my feet. I've been experiencing some heart palpitations, but I think that comes from a cheap nasal inhaler I bought at Wal-Mart. Probably Chinese stuff. My nose is still bleeding a little two days later.
Another one of the reasons I drove up to the state capital was to sing the vowels along the way. Of all the chanting I've done using mantrums I've been taught from other cultures, and even the nursery rhymes I learned as a child, and the earliest prayers I learned ("Now I lay me down to sleep, I pray the Lord my soul to keep... "), singing the vowels work real well for me for calming down and connecting all the stray parts of myself together.
After I left the museum and drove to downtown Raleigh on the streets I knew in my youth I was just about to get on Interstate 40 to drive home when I saw a sign pointing to the State Farmers Market. I'd never been there although I have heard a lot about it. My sister-in-law next door goes there frequently, and has encouraged me to take a look.
There were lots of fresh vegetables all displayed in fine fashion, but not like the fancy fresh food markets I've seen in other places. No need here. Not enough competition to go to the trouble to put all those vegetables in neat pyramid stacks to show them off. I bought a couple of huge one-slice sandwich tomatoes like the ones I've never been able to grow myself.
On the way out of the market area I saw they had a large restaurant with lots of cars parked there. I was hungry, so I decided to go inside to eat. That's not as simple as it has been in the past. Mostly because I stopped eating gluten to see where that leads, but also because I've stopped eating dairy. I'm suspicious I may be lactose intolerant, and my fondness for sour cream on practically all the food I eat may be what leads to outbreaks of psoriasis.
The swollen red spots on my toes that I have previously figured to be a fungus infection ain't no fungus infection, but psoriasis. It comes along with the RA. No salve or medicine I've ever used on it to make it go away, made it go away. But, it does go away eventually. Now, I'm attempting to figure out what makes it bloom in the first place. It may or may not be lactose intolerance.
The real problem, as far as eating out is concerned is the gluten diet I've assumed. It prohibits any wheat products, and that indicates sandwich breads, so I'm stuck with finding something to eat in other than fast food joints where practically everything they offer is served on white bread.
I knew that when I bought those two huge tomatoes that would easily make four one-slice tomato sandwiches apiece. It's a nostalgic binge, and since that's so I would have to make them with slices of white bread and mayonnaise, salt and black pepper. No more and no less. That's how it's done. Well, in the past, that's how it was done. Tonight I just ate a couple of slices of tomato with salt and pepper and pretended it was just as good without the sliced bread. It isn't. '-)
❦
Death And Duty
❧
My bad credit record caught up with me again last week when I tried to buy an iPhone. I might be able to get some cell phone before its all over but the shouting. That eerie silence might be soon if my life depends on this bowl of soup I am is eating at three o'clock in the morning. Its been in the refrigerator for a while. How long, exactly, I'm not too sure. I nuked it for about three minutes, so it's dead for sure
Life is all about death recently. My sister-in-law's youngest brother has rheumatoid arthritis like I do, but with complications I don't have yet. He has forth-stage throat cancer and its not a pretty sight. He has his own house, but she moved him into their old house, which is located next to my house.
I visited her yesterday afternoon to return a router me and my brother thought we might need to get the computer network setup, and to pay him for the ethernet cable he bought for me on sale. She invited me to come in and talk for a while, and it soon became obvious that she needed to chat for a while to get her mind off of her sick brother.
She knows I understand these things. I was with my father before he died and lived with my mother for over two years without working. It was a hard time to witness her lose her mind and eventually her body, but she didn't know who she was when she finally died, and thus, the woman who was my mother and my father's wife did not taste death. A human animal did, but not the personality that she developed to serve those ends.
This not "tasting death" proposition has been on my mind lately because that's the phrase the early Christian writing labeled The Gospel of Thomas calls it. At the beginning of it the promise is made that if one understands the sayings contained within this gospel they "will not taste death".
There is an e-mail discussion list about the Gnostic Gospels. More specifically we discuss the Gospel of Thomas, but there are lots of so-called Gnostic Gospels and Thomas is just one of them. It's not a heavily moderated group, so anybody discusses about anything they want to.
My interest in participating in these discussions has to do with the way I rejected the Southern Baptist religion that was being forced on me. Presently I conclude that it was the right thing for me to do, in fact, there is a saying that specifically says so:
55 Jesus said, "Whoever does not hate father and mother cannot be my disciple, and whoever does not hate brothers and sisters, and carry the cross as I do, will not be worthy of me."
http://users.misericordia.edu//davies/thomas/Trans.htm
When I was rejecting the Protestant religion I was raised in I wasn't aware these sayings existed. As far as I was concerned I was doing it as the normal teenager rebellion people in Western cultures have grown to accept as a passing fancy, and for most people it apparently is a "phase" of growing up.
Not me. I tried in some ways to get over my rebellious feelings and gradually rejoin the literal church of people I grew up with and around, but the vision quest I accepted (seemingly of my own volition), that I call the "go ye therefore" mission because it is part of the KJV, literally prevented me from re-dedicating myself to the Southern Baptist community.
This discussion group I participate in led me to an early Christian group who were called the Doceticists. Some of their contemporaries including the Roman Catholic Church rejected their views as untenable, and tried to burn all their literature. The Gnostic Gospels only survived because they were buried in a large ceramic jar that was only found in 1945, six years after I was born, and not translated properly for a long time afterward, and they're still being redacted constantly today.
The Doceticists had one belief that threw them out of whack with the Catholics, and that was the fact that they refused to worship a spiritual Christ who could become human. They didn't accept the God-as-man theory of worship. Neither do I. The writer Anne Rice stated it well, "I haven't given up on Christ, I've given up on the church."
It's my sense of things that she was referring to the Catholic Church. I can't say that because I only know what shows up in the media about the Catholic Church. I've been exposed to it a little through it's songs I sang in college glee clubs, and I've watched the stuff on TV about the abuse of it's priests, but the purportedly terrible things they do are as prevalent in the Protestant religion.
The "go ye therefore" ritual I undertook was not my conscious intention when I entered it. As far as I was concerned I briefly "ran away from home" when I was fifteen years old and hitch-hiked from North Carolina down to my grandparent's house in Mississippi, because I couldn't justify my hatred of my parents for their attempt to make me into their bitch.
I literally didn't realize at the time or for many decades later, that their treatment of me was probably better than how many if not most kids in the Bible Belt got treated: Spare the rod, spoil the child. It was only much later that I realize that the route I had taken was common for people seriously seeking their own identity. One that didn't die when the body dies. One that "doesn't taste death".
Maybe it was the famous psychologist Adler who called this process "individuation". That label works for me more than the more romantic ones like "enlightenment" or "peak experience". It's quite simple. Every aspect of what one has been taught they are gets stripped away until there is nothing left but you and the docetic Christ. In that case, it's easy to see that you are not Christ, so you must be what you've been calling "me" all your life, as in "Thou shall not worship any other God before 'me'."
❦
My bad credit record caught up with me again last week when I tried to buy an iPhone. I might be able to get some cell phone before its all over but the shouting. That eerie silence might be soon if my life depends on this bowl of soup I am is eating at three o'clock in the morning. Its been in the refrigerator for a while. How long, exactly, I'm not too sure. I nuked it for about three minutes, so it's dead for sure
Life is all about death recently. My sister-in-law's youngest brother has rheumatoid arthritis like I do, but with complications I don't have yet. He has forth-stage throat cancer and its not a pretty sight. He has his own house, but she moved him into their old house, which is located next to my house.
I visited her yesterday afternoon to return a router me and my brother thought we might need to get the computer network setup, and to pay him for the ethernet cable he bought for me on sale. She invited me to come in and talk for a while, and it soon became obvious that she needed to chat for a while to get her mind off of her sick brother.
She knows I understand these things. I was with my father before he died and lived with my mother for over two years without working. It was a hard time to witness her lose her mind and eventually her body, but she didn't know who she was when she finally died, and thus, the woman who was my mother and my father's wife did not taste death. A human animal did, but not the personality that she developed to serve those ends.
This not "tasting death" proposition has been on my mind lately because that's the phrase the early Christian writing labeled The Gospel of Thomas calls it. At the beginning of it the promise is made that if one understands the sayings contained within this gospel they "will not taste death".
There is an e-mail discussion list about the Gnostic Gospels. More specifically we discuss the Gospel of Thomas, but there are lots of so-called Gnostic Gospels and Thomas is just one of them. It's not a heavily moderated group, so anybody discusses about anything they want to.
My interest in participating in these discussions has to do with the way I rejected the Southern Baptist religion that was being forced on me. Presently I conclude that it was the right thing for me to do, in fact, there is a saying that specifically says so:
55 Jesus said, "Whoever does not hate father and mother cannot be my disciple, and whoever does not hate brothers and sisters, and carry the cross as I do, will not be worthy of me."
http://users.misericordia.edu//davies/thomas/Trans.htm
When I was rejecting the Protestant religion I was raised in I wasn't aware these sayings existed. As far as I was concerned I was doing it as the normal teenager rebellion people in Western cultures have grown to accept as a passing fancy, and for most people it apparently is a "phase" of growing up.
Not me. I tried in some ways to get over my rebellious feelings and gradually rejoin the literal church of people I grew up with and around, but the vision quest I accepted (seemingly of my own volition), that I call the "go ye therefore" mission because it is part of the KJV, literally prevented me from re-dedicating myself to the Southern Baptist community.
This discussion group I participate in led me to an early Christian group who were called the Doceticists. Some of their contemporaries including the Roman Catholic Church rejected their views as untenable, and tried to burn all their literature. The Gnostic Gospels only survived because they were buried in a large ceramic jar that was only found in 1945, six years after I was born, and not translated properly for a long time afterward, and they're still being redacted constantly today.
The Doceticists had one belief that threw them out of whack with the Catholics, and that was the fact that they refused to worship a spiritual Christ who could become human. They didn't accept the God-as-man theory of worship. Neither do I. The writer Anne Rice stated it well, "I haven't given up on Christ, I've given up on the church."
It's my sense of things that she was referring to the Catholic Church. I can't say that because I only know what shows up in the media about the Catholic Church. I've been exposed to it a little through it's songs I sang in college glee clubs, and I've watched the stuff on TV about the abuse of it's priests, but the purportedly terrible things they do are as prevalent in the Protestant religion.
The "go ye therefore" ritual I undertook was not my conscious intention when I entered it. As far as I was concerned I briefly "ran away from home" when I was fifteen years old and hitch-hiked from North Carolina down to my grandparent's house in Mississippi, because I couldn't justify my hatred of my parents for their attempt to make me into their bitch.
I literally didn't realize at the time or for many decades later, that their treatment of me was probably better than how many if not most kids in the Bible Belt got treated: Spare the rod, spoil the child. It was only much later that I realize that the route I had taken was common for people seriously seeking their own identity. One that didn't die when the body dies. One that "doesn't taste death".
Maybe it was the famous psychologist Adler who called this process "individuation". That label works for me more than the more romantic ones like "enlightenment" or "peak experience". It's quite simple. Every aspect of what one has been taught they are gets stripped away until there is nothing left but you and the docetic Christ. In that case, it's easy to see that you are not Christ, so you must be what you've been calling "me" all your life, as in "Thou shall not worship any other God before 'me'."
❦
Monday, November 15, 2010
Names, Naymes, And Not-Mes
❧
The unseeable abstract elements that make up the more of me than the other can "see" are memories composed in a world without words in order to be seen as holograms in the mind of the other. Among those memores are the images of my first encounter with a home computer in 1986.
My brother brought a used TS-80 over to my house and plopped on the table beside my fairly new electric typewriter (with a one-line LED screen for editing), and told me non-chalantly that I wouldn't need it anymore, and with a sniggering, knowing little smile, told me rather arrogantly that I might as well give it away. Smart aleck! I did just that in less than a month.
The next step in my digital adventure that started in 1986 when I was nearly fifty years old was paying for an internet account with a local phone number. Soon after that the WWW browser software opened up a whole world.
Soon after the WWW and a browser were invented internet search engines like Google and Yahoo signaled the end of physical building for libraries, and soon there won't be any need for brick and mortar building to provide young people with a formal education.
I'd bet good money that within ten years classroom teachers from one end of the spectrum to the other won't be needed. Coming from a family of educators, this makes me a little sad, but what is coming down the pike will be easier on everybody.
I foresee a ti-me in the near future in which teaching holograms can be installed within the brain/body just like with software without leaving one's ho-me. It's a humiliating fact that humans are wireless computers just as soon as the umbilical cord is severed. Selah
Nobody yet, as far as I know, understands the true meaning of "Selah". Some translators think it's some sort of musical symbol used because the holy books were originally written in the poetic form. They were set up to be performed for the benefit of illiterate people as stories and parables to elicit an "Aha!" moment as an induction technique for getting the sheeple to put more moolah in their hat when they passed the plate.
Some scholars conclude that Selah acted like a Coda sign. I personally use it as a silly affectation to give my nemesis something to dwell on besides what might matter to his employer to make three mice run up the clock. Why would I not?
The very behaviors that have forced me to be a hermit-like creature came into play yesterday. My youngest brother is an Aquarius and typically he's a very friendly, gregarious person. He eagerly greets people with deep sincerity and it's real. Not me. I know how to do this hale fellow, backslapping routine. We were both taught it as kids by our progressive parents. Often enough, in my opinion, it's politically expedient to act in such a manner, but for me it's not natural like it is with my brothers.
Networking our houses together was his original idea that we've talked or chatted about in the past. I tried to get it set up a few years ago, but didn't have the technical expertise to make it happen. I don't think my brother did either, at the time, but a lotta water has passed under the bridge since the first effort.
He went into business for himself by building a website for selling the books he wrote, and then realized he could sell hard-to-get journeyman's tools over the same set up, and his need to become an expert on networking was forced by the price gifted technicians want for their services.
A few days ago he was shopping for bargains at Lowe's, a home-builder store, as he is prone to do, having a Virgo rising, and saw a real deal on a couple of spools of ethernet cable. $20 for 250 feet (76.2 M) instead of the $150 it normally cost, and the race was on. He brought it home and pretty much dictated that "we" we gonna do this thing. I gratefully accepted the challenge. I had everything to gain, and pretty cheaply too.
My brother did all the technical stuff like putting the right wires in the right place on the ethernet sockets and crimping them together. He has all the tools and testing equipment because of his need for it at his business location. But, all throughout the project we had to go here and there for supplies, and of course, we ate out at his favorite restaurants and this activity put me in physical contact with lots of human beings. Many of whom actually know my real name. Bummer. I love being felix. I'm sorta convinced he will stay integrated when the body goes Kaput!
Some people on the internet know my legal name. It amazes me how readily they accept felix as my real name without pushing for my legal nayme. I created felix as a container for the new personality traits I began to acquire after I received my remembering vision. That's what people all over the world do when they bejin a new life as a genie. '-)
❦
The unseeable abstract elements that make up the more of me than the other can "see" are memories composed in a world without words in order to be seen as holograms in the mind of the other. Among those memores are the images of my first encounter with a home computer in 1986.
My brother brought a used TS-80 over to my house and plopped on the table beside my fairly new electric typewriter (with a one-line LED screen for editing), and told me non-chalantly that I wouldn't need it anymore, and with a sniggering, knowing little smile, told me rather arrogantly that I might as well give it away. Smart aleck! I did just that in less than a month.
The next step in my digital adventure that started in 1986 when I was nearly fifty years old was paying for an internet account with a local phone number. Soon after that the WWW browser software opened up a whole world.
Soon after the WWW and a browser were invented internet search engines like Google and Yahoo signaled the end of physical building for libraries, and soon there won't be any need for brick and mortar building to provide young people with a formal education.
I'd bet good money that within ten years classroom teachers from one end of the spectrum to the other won't be needed. Coming from a family of educators, this makes me a little sad, but what is coming down the pike will be easier on everybody.
I foresee a ti-me in the near future in which teaching holograms can be installed within the brain/body just like with software without leaving one's ho-me. It's a humiliating fact that humans are wireless computers just as soon as the umbilical cord is severed. Selah
Nobody yet, as far as I know, understands the true meaning of "Selah". Some translators think it's some sort of musical symbol used because the holy books were originally written in the poetic form. They were set up to be performed for the benefit of illiterate people as stories and parables to elicit an "Aha!" moment as an induction technique for getting the sheeple to put more moolah in their hat when they passed the plate.
Some scholars conclude that Selah acted like a Coda sign. I personally use it as a silly affectation to give my nemesis something to dwell on besides what might matter to his employer to make three mice run up the clock. Why would I not?
The very behaviors that have forced me to be a hermit-like creature came into play yesterday. My youngest brother is an Aquarius and typically he's a very friendly, gregarious person. He eagerly greets people with deep sincerity and it's real. Not me. I know how to do this hale fellow, backslapping routine. We were both taught it as kids by our progressive parents. Often enough, in my opinion, it's politically expedient to act in such a manner, but for me it's not natural like it is with my brothers.
Networking our houses together was his original idea that we've talked or chatted about in the past. I tried to get it set up a few years ago, but didn't have the technical expertise to make it happen. I don't think my brother did either, at the time, but a lotta water has passed under the bridge since the first effort.
He went into business for himself by building a website for selling the books he wrote, and then realized he could sell hard-to-get journeyman's tools over the same set up, and his need to become an expert on networking was forced by the price gifted technicians want for their services.
A few days ago he was shopping for bargains at Lowe's, a home-builder store, as he is prone to do, having a Virgo rising, and saw a real deal on a couple of spools of ethernet cable. $20 for 250 feet (76.2 M) instead of the $150 it normally cost, and the race was on. He brought it home and pretty much dictated that "we" we gonna do this thing. I gratefully accepted the challenge. I had everything to gain, and pretty cheaply too.
My brother did all the technical stuff like putting the right wires in the right place on the ethernet sockets and crimping them together. He has all the tools and testing equipment because of his need for it at his business location. But, all throughout the project we had to go here and there for supplies, and of course, we ate out at his favorite restaurants and this activity put me in physical contact with lots of human beings. Many of whom actually know my real name. Bummer. I love being felix. I'm sorta convinced he will stay integrated when the body goes Kaput!
Some people on the internet know my legal name. It amazes me how readily they accept felix as my real name without pushing for my legal nayme. I created felix as a container for the new personality traits I began to acquire after I received my remembering vision. That's what people all over the world do when they bejin a new life as a genie. '-)
❦
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