WTF is that?

 WTF IS THAT?

Is it just a bunch of brainwashed fools 

being "spiritual"?

or ...

Every last single one of them sitting quietly, alert, 

and commited to being right there ... and nothing else.

No Thought

No Reflection

No Analysis

No Cultivation

No Intention

Let it Settle Itself

You don't have to decide one way or the other. Suggesting we sit in quiet contemplation that 10,000 Buddhist Monks are doing just that. Dig it!

Cousin Munyechekbigbagfulski Wronski

Here we have Cousin Munyechekbigbagfulski Wronski. "Cash" we call him. Yes, we know his given name is a bit much, but too much was never a problem for him. Perhaps its just the karmic inheritance from such a lengthy moniker. A Calvinist, through and through. "God rewards the good" kind of thing.

So the story goes that he took the Dale Carnegie approach and went "next level" with it. "Think and grow rich." Well, he did. 

How rich? Let's just say that he made Uncle Benjamin look like a piker. And, said Uncle was as you may know 1% of the 1%. Cousin "Cash" has, as they say, the world by the ass. 

You never heard of him? Like all the well to do, he keeps out of the limelight. Parties at any one of his palazzos which are scattered like confetti around the globe, all telephones, cameras, and note taking paraphernalia were left at the door. Non-dislosures signed before entering the festivities. 

Rumor has it that the cellars in all his so many domiciles are stacked to the gills with cash. And, big bills mind you.

Okay, you say, he's "RICH!". What's he like in person.

Let's just say that dumb sonofabitch was one lucky sonofabitch. Babcha said of him, "That boy's brains are just painted on!". "Kapusta for brains!" [Kapusta is Cabbage in the Mother Tongue.]

So, how come? One dumb but lucky sonofabitch. How lucky? You know that bit about the optimistic kid who starts frantically digging into a pile of horse poop ... "There's a pony in here somewhere!". Well, our Cash Cousin actually did find a pony once, just doing that. Imagine! He was his own golden goose. No, his poop was just like anyone else's. Not quite that golden. 

What's the upshot of all the regaling you with the stupifying story of our dear Cousin. Just this: If you yourself want to think and grow rich, forget it. Cash was there first. Got all of it. As they say, "Cash is King".

Want more? Here's the full house of Wronski. Behold!

 

Wise Lion ...

The donkey told the tiger: The grass is blue.

The tiger replied: No, the grass is green​.

The discussion became heated, and the two decided to submit the issue to arbitration, and to do so they approached the lion.

Before reaching the clearing in the forest where the lion was sitting on his throne, the donkey started screaming: ′′Your Highness, isn't it true that the grass is blue?"

​
The lion replied: "True, the grass is blue"​.

The donkey rushed forward and continued: ′′The tiger disagrees with me and contradicts me and annoys me. Please punish him"​.

The king then declared: ′′The tiger will be punished with 5 years of silence"​.

The donkey jumped with joy and went on his way, content and repeating: ′′The grass is blue"​..

The tiger accepted his punishment, but he asked the lion: ′′Your Majesty, why have you punished me, after all, the grass is green?"​

The lion replied: ′′In fact, the grass is green"​.

The tiger asked: ′′So why do you punish me?"​

The lion replied:
That has nothing to do with the question of whether the grass is blue or green. The punishment is because it is not possible for a brave, intelligent creature like you to waste time arguing with a donkey, and on top of that to come and bother me with that question.

The worst waste of time is arguing with the fool and fanatic who doesn't care about truth or reality, but only the victory of his beliefs and illusions. Never waste time on discussions that make no sense... There are people who for all the evidence presented to them, do not have the ability to understand, and others who are blinded by ego, hatred and resentment, and the only thing that they want is to be right even if they aren’t.
When ignorance screams, intelligence shuts up. Your peace and tranquility are worth more.

Adapted from an unknown Author

THE LAST SHALL BE FIRST

 "THE LAST SHALL BE FIRST"

[Who hasn't heard that one?] 

When I was in grammar school with the Good Sisters, I remember how when it was time to line up single file to go somewhere or other, there'd be a tussle to see who would go first. 

Actually, even at my very select Jesuit preparatory high school we had the same thing going on. We attended Mass daily in the chapel. The one who sat in the first row in the seat place right next to the aisle was the one who got to got get into the lunch room first. I even saw a skirmish with one rather intractable lad. They solved the problem by mixing up which row in the chapel would go to lunch first after the Mass.

But, back in grade school I remember indelibly once when Sister gave us the lesson, "THE LAST SHALL BE FIRST". And, just like a bunch of idiotic nincompoops — the real lesson going completely past us — we'd fight for who would be the last. Really! I remembering so well.

So what is the real lesson there? Aside from the observable fact that the Nuns were dealing with a bunch of stupid heads. 

Well Jesus spoke on the subject. And the Buddhists also give us a clear answer. There's such a thing as the Bodhisattva Vows. To live to see all sentient beings enlightened. In Christian terms, you could say that a Bodhisattva is the one who intends to be the very last one on the bus. In other words, "I'm not going to heaven until everyone else goes there before me. That I may be a help."

Like so many of such sayings, it's too easy just to nod in assent. It's worth contemplating and considering putting it into practice.

PRISONER OF CONSCIOUSNESS

 PRISONER OF CONSCIOUSNESS

We live in a fabrication of our own making. As Plato would call it, a "cave". You know Plato's Cave?

Plato, as I take the gentleman, observed that we mostly live in a "cave", mezmerized by the shadows on the wall. And, that there's an other level just outside. One that we meet directly as it is. 

We live there when we're live preoccupied with a picture/story of the world of our own imagining. And we fight and tussle over who's version is correct, or worth following. 

There's another world. The real world. The world we live in together in common. Mountains, rivers, hills, valleys, the sky, the Sun and the Moon. The imagined world is the one we overlay on that basic canvas. 

All it takes to find way out of the cave is to entertain the questions: "What is this?" "What am I?" In other words to consider the possibility that it's not what you think it is. Not what anyone thinks it is. 

Breath of God

There was a moment when Moses had asked God what his name is. God was gracious enough to answer, and the name he gave is recorded in the original Hebrew as YHWH.

Over time we’ve arbitrarily added an “a” and an “e” in there to get YaHWeH, presumably because we have a preference for vowels. But scholars and rabis have noted that the letters YHWH represent breathing sounds, or aspirated consonants. When pronounced without intervening vowels, it actually sounds like breathing. YH (inhale): WH (exhale).

So a baby’s first cry, his first breath, speaks the name of God. A deep sigh calls His name – or a groan or gasp that is too heavy for mere words. Even an atheist would speak His name unaware that their very breathe is giving constant acknowledgment to God. Likewise, a person leaves this earth with their last breath, when God’s name is no longer filing their lungs.

So when I can’t utter anything else, is my cry calling out His name?

Being alive means I speak His name constantly. Is it heard the loudest when I’m the quietest?

In sadness, we breathe heavy sighs. In joy, our lungs feel almost like they will burst. In fear we hold our breath and have to be told to breathe slowly to help us calm down. When we’re about to do something hard, we take a deep breath to find our courage.

When I think about it, breathing is giving him praise. Even in the hardest moments!

This is so beautiful and fills me with emotion every time I grasp the thought. God chose to give himself a name that we can’t help but speak every moment we’re alive. All of us, always, everywhere. Waking, sleeping, breathing, with the name of God on our lips. (Psalms 150:6)

Author: Unknown

Illustration credit: Scott Erickson

Terence Mckenna Quotes

Terence McKenna (November 16, 1946 – April 3, 2000) was an American philosopher, ethnobotanist, psychonaut, lecturer, writer and author who spend much of his life speaking and writing about a variety of important subjects, including but not limited to, shamanism, psychedelic drugs, plant-based entheogens, alchemy, metaphysics, language, culture, environmentalism, technology and the nature of human consciousness.

1. “I think of going to the grave without having a psychedelic experience like going to the grave without ever having sex. It means that you never figured out what it is all about. The mystery is in the body and the way the body works itself into nature.”

2. “If the words ‘life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness’ don’t include the right to experiment with your own consciousness, then the Declaration of Independence isn’t worth the hemp it was written on.”

3. “If you don’t smoke cannabis, you may spend your evening balancing your checking account. If you do smoke cannabis you may spend your evening contemplating the causes of the Greek Renaissance.”

4. “Stop consuming images and start producing them.”

5. “You are a divine being. You matter, you count. You come from realms of unimaginable power and light, and you will return to those realms.”

6. “You are an explorer, and you represent our species, and the greatest good you can do is to bring back a new idea, because our world is endangered by the absence of good ideas. Our world is in crisis because of the absence of consciousness.”

7. “The male dominant agenda is so fragile that any competitor is felt as a deadly foe.”

8. “You simply have to turn your back on a culture that has gone sterile and dead and get with the program of a living world and the imagination.”

9. “The imagination is the goal of history. I see culture as an effort to literally realize our collective dreams.”

10. The message of psychedelics is that culture can be re-engineered as a set of emotional and spiritual values rather than products. This is terrifying news.”

11. “Nature loves courage. You make the commitment and nature will respond to that commitment by removing impossible obstacles. Dream the impossible dream and the world will not grind you under, it will lift you up. This is the trick. This is what all these teachers and philosophers who really counted, who really touched the alchemical gold, this is what they understood. This is the shamanic dance in the waterfall. This is how magic is done. By hurling yourself into the abyss and discovering its a feather bed.”

12. “Half the time you think your thinking you’re actually listening.”

13. “Psychedelics are illegal not because a loving government is concerned that you may jump out of a third story window. Psychedelics are illegal because they dissolve opinion structures and culturally laid down models of behaviour and information processing. They open you up to the possibility that everything you know is wrong.”

14. “The artist’s task is to save the soul of mankind; and anything less is a dithering while Rome burns. If artists cannot find the way, then the way cannot be found.”

15. “Animals are something invented by plants to move seeds around. An extremely yang solution to a peculiar problem which they faced.”

16. “The syntactical nature of reality, the real secret of magic, is that the world is made of words. And if you know the words that the world is made of, you can make of it whatever you wish.”

17. “The purpose of life is to familiarize oneself with this after-death body so that the act of dying will not create confusion in the psyche.”

18. “We tend to disempower ourselves. We tend to believe that we don’t matter. And in the act of taking that idea to ourselves we give everything away to somebody else, to something else.”

19. “The shaman is not merely a sick man, or a madman; he is a sick man who has healed himself.”

20. “You see, a secret is not something untold. It’s something which can’t be told.”

21. “If you don’t have a plan, you become part of somebody else’s plan.”

22. “Nature is not our enemy, to be raped and conquered. Nature is ourselves, to be cherished and explored.”

23. “We have been to the moon, we have charted the depths of the ocean and the heart of the atom, but we have a fear of looking inward to ourselves because we sense that is where all the contradictions flow together.”

24. “My technique is don’t believe anything. If you believe in something, you are automatically precluded from believing its opposite.”

25. “It’s clearly a crisis of two things: of consciousness and conditioning. We have the technological power, the engineering skills to save our planet, to cure disease, to feed the hungry, to end war; But we lack the intellectual vision, the ability to change our minds. We must decondition ourselves from 10,000 years of bad behavior. And, it’s not easy.”

26. “We can begin the restructuring of thought by declaring legitimate what we have denied for so long. Lets us declare Nature to be legitimate. The notion of illegal plants is obnoxious and ridiculous in the first place.”

27. “Some kind of dialogue is now going on between individual human beings and the sum total of human knowledge and nothing can stop it.”

28. “Nothing comes unannounced, but many can miss the announcement. So it’s very important to actually listen to your own intuition rather than driving through it.”

29. “We need to interact with like-minded people throughout the world to establish the new intellectual order which will be the salvation of mankind.”

30. “Western civilization is a loaded gun pointed at the head of this planet.”

31. “Television is by nature the dominator drug par excellence. Control of content, uniformity of content, repeatability of content make it inevitably a tool of coersion, brainwashing, and manipulation.”

32. “Ego is a structure that is erected by a neurotic individual who is a member of a neurotic culture against the facts of the matter. And culture, which we put on like an overcoat, is the collectivized consensus about what sort of neurotic behaviors are acceptable.”

33. “We are told ‘no’, we’re unimportant, we’re peripheral. ‘Get a degree, get a job, get this, get that.’ And then you’re a player, but you don’t want to play in the game. You want to reclaim your mind and get it out of the hands of the cultural engineers who want to turn you into a half-baked moron consuming all this trash that’s being manufactured out of the bones of a dying world.”

34. “It is the imagination that argues for the Divine Spark within human beings. It is literally a descent of the World’s Soul into all of us.”

35. “The apocalypse is not something which is coming. The apocalypse has arrived in major portions of the planet and it’s only because we live within a bubble of incredible privilege and social insulation that we still have the luxury of anticipating the apocalypse.”

36. “Even as the nineteenth century had to come to grips with the notion of human descent from apes, we must now come to terms with the fact that those apes were stoned apes.”

37. “We are so much the victims of abstraction that with the Earth in flames we can barely rouse ourselves to wander across the room and look at the thermostat.”

38. “If you keep yourself as the final arbiter you will be less susceptible to infection by cultural illusion”

39. “The problem is not to find the answer, it’s to face the answer.”

40. “The way you stretch the envelope of culture is by creating language.”

41. “The real tension is not between matter and spirit, or time and space, the real tension is between information and nonsense.”

42. “Nothing lasts but nothing is lost.”

43. “Matter is not lacking in magic, matter is magic.”

44. “People are so alienated from their own soul that when they meet their soul they think it comes from another star system.”

45. “Nature is not our enemy, to be raped and conquered. Nature is ourselves, to be cherished and explored.”

46. “Ideology always paves the way toward atrocity.”

47. “The creative act is a letting down of the net of human imagination into the ocean of chaos on which we are suspended, and the attempt to bring out of it ideas. It is the night sea journey, the lone fisherman on a tropical sea with his nets, and you let these nets down – sometimes, something tears through them that leaves them in shreds and you just row for shore, and put your head under your bed and pray. At other times what slips through are the minutiae, the minnows of this ichthyological metaphor of idea chasing. But, sometimes, you can actually bring home something that is food, food for the human community that we can sustain ourselves on and go forward.”

48. “You don’t want to become so open-minded that the wind can whistle between your ears.”

49. “If you’re not the hero of your own novel, then what kind of novel is it? You need to do some heavy editing.”

50. “Culture is the effort to hold back the mystery, and replace it with a mythology.”

51. “Unexamined cultural values & limitations of language have made us unwitting prisoners of our own assumptions.”

52. “This is a society, a world, a planet dying because there is not enough consciousness, because there is not enough awareness, enough coordination of intent-to-problem. And yet, we spend vast amounts of money stigmatizing people and substances that are part of this effort to expand consciousness, see things in different ways, unleash creativity. Isn’t it perfectly clear that business as usual is a bullet through the head?”

53. “The culmination of man’s effort in time will be the perfection and the release of the human soul. And it’s not that we are ‘doing’ it. It’s that a natural law that we are still unaware of is inexorably unfolding.”

54. “Our world is in danger by the absence of good ideas. Our world is in crisis because of the absence of consciousness. And so to whatever degree any one of us, can bring back a small piece of the picture and contribute it to the building of the new paradigm, then we participate in the redemption of the human spirit, and that after all is what it’s really all about.”

55. “We have the money, the power, the medical understanding, the scientific know-how, the love and the community to produce a kind of human paradise. But we are led by the least among us – the least intelligent, the least noble, the least visionary. We are led by the least among us and we do not fight back against the dehumanizing values that are handed down as control icons.”

56. “What civilization is, is 6 billion people trying to make themselves happy by standing on each other’s shoulders and kicking each other’s teeth in. It’s not a pleasant situation.”

57. “Culture is a perversion. It fetishizes objects, creates consumer mania, it preaches endless forms of false happiness, endless forms of false understanding in the form of squirrelly religions and silly cults. It invites people to diminish themselves and dehumanize themselves by behaving like machines.

58. “Culture is not your friend. Culture is for other people’s convenience and the convenience of various institutions, churches, companies, tax collection schemes, what have you. It is not your friend. It insults you. It disempowers you. It uses and abuses you. None of us are well treated by culture.”

59. “Personal empowerment means deconditioning yourself from the values and the programs of the society and putting your own values and programs in place.”

60. “Chaos is what we’ve lost touch with. This is why it is given a bad name. It is feared by the dominant archetype of our world, which is Ego, which clenches because its existance is defined in terms of control.”

61. “Ego is a structure that is erected by a neurotic individual who is a member of a neurotic culture against the facts of the matter. And culture, which we put on like an overcoat, is the collectivized consensus about what sort of neurotic behaviors are acceptable.”

61. “You have to take seriously the notion that understanding the universe is your responsibility, because the only understanding of the universe that will be useful to you is your own understanding.”

62. “The apocalypse is not something which is coming. The apocalypse has arrived in major portions of the planet and it’s only because we live within a bubble of incredible privilege and social insulation that we still have the luxury of anticipating the apocalypse. If you go to Bosnia or Somalia or Peru or much of the third-world then it appears that the apocalypse has already arrived.”

63. “We are so much the victims of abstraction that with the Earth in flames we can barely rouse ourselves to wander across the room and look at the thermostat.”

64. “The cost of sanity, in this society, is a certain level of alienation.”

65. “The future of communication is the future of the evolution of the human soul.”

66. “Our need to feel part of the world seems to demand that we express ourselves through creative activity.”

67. “Part of what psychedelics do is they decondition you from cultural values. This is what makes it such a political hot potato. Since all culture is a kind of con game, the most dangerous candy you can hand out is one which causes people to start questioning the rules of the game.”

68. “Life lived in the absence of the psychedelic experience is life trivialized, life denied, life enslaved to the ego.”

69. “We have to create culture, don’t watch TV, don’t read magazines, don’t even listen to NPR. Create your own roadshow. The nexus of space and time where you are now is the most immediate sector of your universe, and if you’re worrying about Michael Jackson or Bill Clinton or somebody else, then you are disempowered, you’re giving it all away to icons, icons which are maintained by an electronic media so that you want to dress like X or have lips like Y. This is shit-brained, this kind of thinking. That is all cultural diversion, and what is real is you and your friends and your associations, your highs, your orgasms, your hopes, your plans, your fears. And we are told ‘no’, we’re unimportant, we’re peripheral. ‘Get a degree, get a job, get a this, get a that.’ And then you’re a player, you don’t want to even play in that game. You want to reclaim your mind and get it out of the hands of the cultural engineers who want to turn you into a half-baked moron consuming all this trash that’s being manufactured out of the bones of a dying world.”

70. “Culture is not your friend, it’s an impediment to understanding what’s going on. That’s why the words cult and culture have a direct relationship to each other. Culture is an extremely repressive cult that leads to all kinds of humiliation and degradation, and automatic, unquestioned and unthinking behaviour.”

71. “We are caged by our cultural programming. Culture is a mass hallucination, and when you step outside the mass hallucination you see it for what it’s worth.”

72. “The internet is light at the end of the tunnel…it is creating a global society”

73. “If the words ‘life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness’ don’t include the right to experiment with your own consciousness, then the Declaration of Independence isn’t worth the hemp it was written on.”

SOURCE: SOFO ARCHON

Children Ask About Life

Children Ask About Life

My Granddaughter and I were talking the other day, and the subject of cooking came up. She observed at how you go through all the effort to prepare a meal, then eat it; and, after all that, there's nothing left. 

To my ear the implicit question was about how things are transitory and immermanent. While she didn't state that in those specific terms as a question she's holding, the question is a good one to ponder. And, the answer, worth realizing.

Those Buddhists have something to show us in that regard: 

Joseph Chilton Pearce Education and the Young Child's Brain Development

There Are No Others

There Are No Others

In the 1940s, a staunch devotee of Bhagavan [Sri Ramana Maharshi], who was also a hard working ashramite had to leave the ashram. Before leaving the ashram he felt so abashed and embarrassed, that he did not have the courage to meet Bhagavan. The other ashramites were helpless in persuading him to stay as he had left unnoticed the previous night. 

TPR was accompanying Bhagavan during his usual morning walk on the hill. Assuming that Bhagavan did not know what had happened the previous evening, TPR told him that this ashramite had left under undesirable circumstances. TPR did so with a sincere, heavy heart for he loved this person very deeply.
Bhagavan stopped walking and turned towards TPR and said, in a harsh and uncompromising tone,
“Just because some one has slipped down one foot, remember sir, you have not moved even an inch up.
Beware! Beware!”

Though Bhagavan‟s voice had a tinge of pain and anguish, these words were spoken with such sternness and authority that TPR got a shock and was almost knocked down to the ground. Seeing his pitiable condition, Bhagavan became mellow, turned back and continued walking with his usual, calm and measured strides. Realising that TPR had not yet got back his composure, Bhagavan told him with great love and affection, “There are no others. One takes the body to be oneself. Hence, one treats others also as bodies. These is only "I AM‟.

When attention is turned inward to "I AM‟, these so called bodies, minds, worlds, good and bad actions, are found to be not there. Attention turned inwards, there prevails only the Truth.

Turned outward, there is nothing but untruth. “I AM‟ is the head of the coin.

"No others‟ is the tail of the same coin.

You are thus, ever the Truth.

Plunge within and be the Truth, always.”

— The teachings of Sri Ramana Maharshi.
Drops from the Ocean.

CHOGYAM TRUNGPA RINPOCHE

Spiritual Materialism & Disappointment

As long as we follow a spiritual approach promising salvation, miracles, liberation, then we are bound by the "golden chain of spirituality."

Such a chain might be beautiful to wear, with its inlaid jewels and intricate carvings, but nevertheless, it imprisons us. People think they can wear the golden chain for decoration without being imprisoned by it, but they are deceiving themselves. As long as one's approach to spirituality is based upon enriching ego, then it is spiritual materialism, a suicidal process rather than a creative one.

All the promises we have heard are pure seduction. We expect the teachings to solve all our problems; we expect to be provided with magical means to deal with our depressions, our aggressions, our sexual hangups. But to our surprise we begin to realize that this is not going to happen. It is very disappointing to realize that we must work on ourselves and our suffering rather than depend upon a savior or the magical power of yogic techniques.

It is disappointing to realize that we have to give up our expectations rather than build on the basis of our preconceptions.

We must allow ourselves to be disappointed, which means the surrendering of me-ness, my achievement. We would like to watch ourselves attain enlightenment, watch our disciples celebrating, worshipping, throwing flowers at us, with miracles and earthquakes occurring and gods and angels singing and so forth. This never happens. The attainment of enlightenment from ego's point of view is extreme death, the death of self, the death of me and mine, the death of the watcher. It is the ultimate and final disappointment. 

Treading the spiritual path is painful. It is a constant unmasking, peeling off of layer after layer of masks. It involves insult after insult.

Such a series of disappointments inspires us to give up ambition. We fall down and down and down, until we touch the ground, until we relate with the basic sanity of earth. We become the lowest of the low, the smallest of the small, a grain of sand, perfectly simple, no expectations. When we are grounded, there is no room for dreaming or frivolous impulse, so our practice at last becomes workable. We begin to learn how to make a proper cup of tea, how to walk straight without tripping. Our whole approach to life becomes more simple and direct, and any teachings we might hear or books we might read become workable. They become confirmations, encouragements to work as a grain of sand, as we are, without expectations, without dreams.
We have heard so many promises, have listened to so many alluring descriptions of exotic places of all kinds, have seen so many dreams, but from the point of view of a grain of sand, we could not care less. We are just a speck of dust in the midst of the universe. At the same time our situation is very spacious, very beautiful and workable. In fact, it is very inviting, inspiring. If you are a grain of sand, the rest of the universe, all the space, all the room is yours, because you obstruct nothing, overcrowd nothing, possess nothing. There is tremendous openness.

You are the emperor of the universe because you are a grain of sand. The world is very simple and at the same time very dignified and open, because your inspiration is based upon disappointment, which is without the ambition of the ego.