~The Rig of History

He was dying at the time and with him went a life.
Memories are habits designed to help others survive.
Oh Mercy, that's what's really going on, at the mercy.
Kazaam, totes a line, and represents nothing so fragile
flashing its pow, no one considers the pause as eternal,
the infinite opening of space in which life finds itself.
Too involved in the status quo, signs and banners - the fare.

Those dedicated studiers of culture's creative language-
I fear for their souls, locked up in our town squares.
Someone made up a loosely collected record as history
and the rest of us were unable to resist this formal bias.
We can't make any new moves dimensionally, together,
precisely because nobody sees history, endlessly absurd.
There's a real abyss between relativity and death in life.

This is a well documented backbone of history's crest.
We call it a biography, a guest list to test with the rest,
calling attention to life on end, clowning and infantile.
Anyone can do it and everyone has - at some time.
Is there a real way to fabricate immortality this way?
Unable to know anything beyond our own eventuality
we spend our time constructing bits of fish tales, in bliss.

Oh but, why? I wouldn't cry out, except I decry this.
For those of you focusing on history in consciousness
don't forget your time is limited; make haste not to waste.
Can you resonate, echo the world's symphony today?
How else to move or progress without flowing in this,
a presence we express simply being alive with all life.
It's the rules and boundaries, rigging we're snared in.

Dec 2009, rjduberg

The Need for More Organization

Right now, in life, I have the urgent sense which sees me utilizing the last 5 minute window before I said I was going to be somewhere that takes me anywhere from 5-10 mins to get to, and then sometimes then some.

Lots to say about my research on Tantra Yoga. I guess the only thing I want to say is that people in that disipline work too hard, focus on money, among other things, and; I'm not saying that that stuff isnecessarily off or bad, the issue doesn't change if circumstances swing positive as I prefer them to be.

Biggest issue for me right now is time, and its relation to my assessments regarding the world in general. I'm not sure if I like the change or not, does that mean I'm not really a pragmatist?

Looking for a job still that doesn't include writing for one...

On Community Response

Burn, Baby, Burn.

I saw the post by Robin and my first thought on responding was not to, reflecting an attitude of non-identification. It's important to see that drama is a vortex that can become so powerful it can override and dominate a person's natural gravity and ground of being.

However, I just got done viewing Jim Carrey's YES MAN on MAX, a beautiful film starring Carrey and Zooey Deschanel (girl in Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy), just a continuous series of scenes in which YES becomes a mantra to situations most would never say YES to nor find even remotely appealing. The beauty of it for me was the humor. So here I am saying NO, contemplating the universal YES to everything often chimed by Tantric sloganeers, and still laughing over the possibilities created in Carrey's film. How could I not take advantage of this GREAT OPPTY to say YES and do some personal lab work of my own. Huh? Are you kidding? LOL

So, after reading your post, my assessment was anything like disgust, in fact. I totally got your active transformation, and enjoyed reading your writing about it.

The only thing I guess I can contribute is that assessment is absolutely natural and critical to life and how we judge the relative value of anything and everything. Negative assessments are just as important as positive ones. From others, as unique as each of us are, it really is counter productive to enter into debates or engage people's assessments. There personal in nature and as one comedian said, "I don't like applause, just throw money!"

In response to Robin's question, which was way too open-ended for me, I think a little context would go a long way in shifting the conversation to being valuable on the level of community which is where it seemed she wanted to take it. My choice is personal responsibility. So how can I respond and be personally responsible with my negative assessments within a community?

It seems to me, by doing the work of transformation, practicing Tantra, saying yes - creating lemonade from lemons, and whatever cliche you have to add to the list - the most important bets are covered. But what about those negative assessments in which we are so identified that we begin to feel disgust, for instance? What I do is create some space, take a break, get a cup of juice, go look at the waves, you know...

And then, ask yourself what your committed to, and consider how relevant the negative assessment is to that context. For the most part, a person's associated disgust is NOT a relevant assessment to the context called OneTantra because OneTantra is like a wave, it only carries information, itself a "community" of relations. Work on the community (how relations are configured, energized, weighted, integrated, etc., etc.) is something that takes place on an entirely different level and is outside the scope of this question. But, for anyone who has ventured to this site with any background in online communities, LOL, disgust is pretty much the overwhelming assessment to include - and Moses is responsibly addressing the source of it. Nuff said bout that.

So, after establishing what rank a value has...  well there it is. This is in my opinion the way to "DO" something about negative assessment on a personal level. At the level of community however, the question for me is whether or not such assessments actually exist at all. 

Suffice it to say, if you have a community based on a negative assessment, your going to promote the transformation of it. The real chore comes when personal negativity corrupts a community promotion. Communities have mandates with purpose. Responding to negative assessment is only valuable then when the assessment is regarding the health of the community.

Holes and voids, the needs of space

There are uninhabited spaces that need our connectivity. They exist around value like blue sky and provide our selves direct contact to that which we value. There are also uninhabited spaces which form the basis for the sense of dangerous weakness, noncommittalness, unclarity, with nothing but space to create this paradoxical effect.

These spaces need substance, structure and energy to complement the value and our clear access and appreciation of it. One space is really a dimension, we call time, the space needing substance is simply our consciousness of timing, cycles, and our agreements. If we are not on time or don't take the time, chaos fouls the blue sky.

Another space, that needs its fill, is underneath, the space which maintains conserves and preserves. In it is a need for disiplines and routines which serve this fortification against natural entropy.

There are more spaces dealing with language and society, spirit, and vitality, and finally evolution. What do those spaces need so that those particular voids do not end up to dispose of us?

~Little Condensates

Condensing all this is my mission
a ball inbetween golf and baseball
which expands on the move
like a basketball, with a heart.

Memories threading into infinity
this is where I find the challenge
love cannot be lost without cost
remembering to be with just this.

My guru Kwan Yin is that this
before I knew, her imaged shine
a gift to hang on my own wall
along with the courage to love.

Such fine impressions, convince
sharing them with the world now
is the one true meaning not yet
What if I'm wrong, will I survive.

So much ado about nothing that
my contribution would be clutter
so I write verse in a condensate
poem after poem with one taste.

Like Rumi's merry-go-round scene
many of these moments pass by
between the synchronous animals
like albino elephants you can't miss.

Will you decide to end this ride
by giving your highest values away?
If it even makes any sense to you
how abundance is made a paradox?


rjd, 11/2009

~Where you go Rumi

When the light arrived, like the dawn, today; I was consciously simplified and simplifying, kind of like laughter feels, but the process was of mind. And this moment of awakening revealed a stunning metaphoric view to what has been a vein of lifelong suffering for me.

When I go there, and I've been there for sorrow, I am honoring love lost. Only in today's light did I see that love doesn't honor that place. I was there with the irrational hope, obsessed with the ongoing last glows from love's departure, that love might have mercy on me and come back.

...to be continued

Michigan

Here's my latest animal photography of Michigan, owned by my roommate Matt Benedict whose from Michigan.

On Foreshadows

This weekend, I underwent a procedure which eliminated an arterial blockage (99.99%)in my heart, next to a branch, saving two arteries as a result. For many months now, I've been attempting to acquire healing from alternative sources motivated by some unknown but felt sense. I attribute that to an inceasing sensitivity and conscious awareness. I never acquired the alternative source of healing and that might be a good thing since it might have prevented me from suffering angina to the extent that I was forced to seek acute medical care. A longer period of time could easily have put me in jeopardy of suffering a heart attack, and given my already weakened heart muscle any additional damage I suffer would put me over the edge of sustainable function.

Alot of negative press has been given to health care here in America, but I do have some wonderful things to say about my doctors. Though I don't have health care due to pre-existing conditions, and my financial situation prevents me from even making payments on the $25,000 hospital bill, they were prepared to intervene and perform the procedure which saved my life, without hesitation. I had to admit myself into Emergency, because in order to have been admitted otherwise would have required a $10,000 deposit. Herein lies the negativity for medical care here in America. We don't go as far as to absolutely deny care, but we won't provide preventative care to people who need it most and are unable to pay, and instead let their symptoms and conditions increase and build until they are about to drop dead before we're willing to help them.

Health care in this country HAS to undergo reform if someone like me is ever provided the motivation to do something more productive in life, given the risk to any income I may produce because of my health status.

On Creating New Possibility II

In addition to creating circumstances at your pleasure, exists the darker side of that equation. One opens the door to circumstances of equal but opposite character which appear 'willy nilly.' These circumstances are the reality test to your being, the moment of payment, the limit of fear manifested in life. Suffering, disease, death are what men commonly refer to these circumstances as being viz. a viz. their being.

I add this note to shine a light on the dark side of creating new possibility in your life. Don't be surprised. Expect and be willing to have one to get the other and vice versa.

On Creating New Possibility

The key here is to recognize that circumstances are your biggest adversary. As circumstances change, it goes without saying that possibilities will resonate those changes when one's consciousness is not up to a level of originality and creativity. It is agreeable to me to designate circumstances as fundamentally comprising a set. At some point, circumstances become irrelevant and valueless to enumerate. With respect to finite sizes of the set, it is important to see that the meta-set or super-set of circumstances is infinite, always changing, with a flow that can and will at times not repeat or overlap with previous sets. Such super circumstances will not resonate to any set of possibilities because the set of possibilities is entirely based on past responses foundationally and is finite, limited in terms of being a kind of referential database, kickstarting our best case scenario responses when circumstances dictate, for efficiency's sake.

When an original set of circumstances emerges, lower states of consciousness will employ simple denial to cope with the impasse. Evolved minds capable of originality, creativity, and receptivity based on the causal level are active at the meta level and have the ability to create possibility anew unencumbered and irrespective to any and all past possibilities as would be necessarily the case, necessary to keep 'the ball rolling' as it were.

To say that one possible response is just that, the ability to recreate one's moments and their possibilities as such is quite different than how your speaking. Such a response exists quite outside of any causal dependence or correlation to circumstance, but rather impact the wider field in which circumstance shows up in, on purpose, and paradoxically, sinse this level of possibility itself is unchangeable and never at effect, is causal and at source.

If i have this right, LOL. For me, language challenges my attempts to be rigorous about my understanding and knowledge of greater truth. Knowing the perfect clarity and stillness at the highest level of all truth and knowledge as unmanifest and unknowingness, is the ultimate expression of this difficulty, I find myself unable to do anything about it much other than dance around it. Higher levels of consciousness then do not respond but instead originate creatively with what appears to lower levels of consciousness as miraculous intervention or magical manifestations of help, etc.

Tantric Master - Barry Long

My inquiry into Tantra has not been very significant yet, except for the discussions I've participated on at OneTantra online. I was prepared to make a serious committment not too long ago to hands on training and study but my offer was not reciprocated properly or equitably by the instructor I contacted. NOW, one of the ladies at OneTantra mentioned Barry Long, which I spent a good deal of time last night briefly reviewing, when I ran into a wildly powerful teaching which was at the same time expressing much of the corruption which destroyed my relationship with the Fellowship of Friends Fourth Way School.

Additionally, I found years of blog posts, both praising and criticizing him. The manner in which he expressed himself was familiar to me as I read his words in a published interview with a journalist at an online magazine dedicated to enlightement and spiritual issues/teaching.

The egoistic lack of compassion and perversion he evidenced (2nd hand for me) said to me that there was a limit to his realization. This limit, this self-centeredness, was a mega contradiction to his teaching, something which was clearly echoed among his closer students' observations about how he would say one thing and do another. The response of course is no one can comprehend the behavior of a master, especially using ordinary social standards.

That's not going to fly with me, however, after reading quite a bit of him about his ideas and teaching, I cannot deny that I was left with a powerful impression regarding what he was offering in terms of a perspective on the relationship between men and women. Clearly, he made it up.  The thing I read which was the key to this was a statement regadrding how every 5 minutes men and women are constantly thinking about each other throughout the day. For him, this was something he expanded and USED to be creative regarding his higher realisations of mind.

I'm certain that there is a distinction between objective knowledge and subjective knowledge. What I've described here is a man who tasted objective states but returned to a very high subjective creative state and began to REASSEMBLE himself there. My bet is that his mechanics produced a continual stream of 'teaching' and because he was able to disentangle himself from that enough to gain some fairly distilled higher thought forms, his words began to ensare those listening like a web. The glue or stickiness came in the form of creating enough insightful space between his ideas that those listening were able to relieve themselves of useless suffering.

He assumes the title tantric master and yet it isn't at all clear whether he wasn't in fact harming more than he helped. The few nuggets I gleamed far underweighed the mass of red flags et al. I found opposing his legitimacy as a true spiritual teacher.

On the Subject of Intent

Does it occur to anyone that focusing on either Yin or Yang, Yes or No, even Unconditional Yeses defined by the acceptance of both; all of these states or positions or perspectives set one up against being in the Golden Mean. And by that, I'm speaking about the truth of what is, simply being present AND awake. I caution against the thinking concerning affirmations which do not account for intrinsic value and meaning in a human's life. To me, such flatland thinking shows up like an eagle mingling on the ground with chickens. If one is really interested in the function of intention in our being then surely it has nothing to do with agreeing with popular and/or better, different or greater expressions regarding the human condition, PRECISELY because all of that is reactive, a product of the past, languaged in jargon and cliche, a message just like the writing on the wall. The purpose of real intention is to bring forth here and now from nothing and spirit. The power of intention is in one sense all inclusive ("the great yes?") however that's like saying a car has wheels.

Please forgive my lack of simplicity on the subject, I have a lifelong issue with my highest intention, and have yet to resolve certain aspects of it. The question for me is regarding how often our intentions are expressed incompletely or in a manner not completely conscious. At some level, the truth is that everything we experience including our own being is directly a function of our intention. If intent is real and matters in the flow and creation of being in the world, then it is not related to subjective interpretation, reasonableness, or explanation. This FACT is consistent with what we all know intention to be in our hearts. Our desires are an expression of our being and uncaused, while all thoughts connecting their details to circumstance and whatnot are at best clever fiction. We may tell ourselves that the reason we intend something is because of such and such or x or y, however we are really lying to say this is why we intend what we do. What we do and our story about it or two completely distinct phenomena, one expressing our being, and the other expressing our culture or style of belonging.

When it comes to manifesting intent then, one's results are more of a benefit if we stop denying them with affirmations which disconnect us from being able to language that which needs to be spoken and heard in our conscious awareness. I'm not saying that affirmations like the 'great yes' are missing the point, they speak something which we all need to hear but like a note in a symphony designed to tell the story of our heritage and culture as humanity they are not intentional, and intention is not dependent on them. Intention is dependent on consciousness to function, which begs the question regarding what consciousness is as I digress. The relevant question is how to resolve our intent by being conscious of its shadow realms, where we've forgotten intentions which are now opposed, crosspurposed, or in some other way degrading to our being satisfied and confident, clear and effective, powerful and magnanimous.

Seeking Spiritual Guidance

What is your life about? Comfort, security, status, power, making a difference, family, love, beauty, truth, healing, teaching, surfing, leisure, art, music, math, science, religion, survival, recovery, duty, honor, God, nature, magic, ideas, sex, drugs, rock-n-roll, justice, winning, yoga, fiction, literature, sports, fashion, business? Everyone has a list with a top and bottom don't they? Understanding that most don't give it a second thought, I have and feel somehow betrayed as my heart decided on something well nigh too extreme and hard. I'm having a problem even writing it right now, there's so much failure and my focus seems to unrealistic and unpragmatic. It was made at what remains perhaps a pinnacle of spiritual suffering in my life. The decision was a response to what I perceived as a completely inadequate preparation the Lutheran religion had given me when confronted with my father's death. I held on to my faith but rejected the church and decided conscious contact with the source of the pain and mystery which had swamped my life was the only thing that would give it any meaning. The sorrow continues unabated today on both accounts, over the death and the fallout of my father's death, and over the lack of realization in my consciousness regarding spiritual enlightenment and union with existence's source (which for now I continue to refer to as god or Christ). There appears to now be one modification regarding my spiritual objective which has to do with accepting lesser authorities than the ultimate source, as long as those lesser beings are in fact authorized and possessing of such spirit which may help me to progress, expand, rise, and otherwise increase my ability to KNOW more and more objectively the true spirit and source.

~Chewing On Air

The Bazooka comics of my childhood gone
finely dusted pieces of pink, growled on.
Little wrappings of waxed paper we opened
making eternity last for a very long moment.

Chewing through the sweet hardness there
once, made the rest, a cause for innocence
and growing old is still growing young, now
chewing on air, and dancing with Kuan Yin.

~Round of Roll

This poem is a late entry but one I thought better not to leave out in the end....

Nothing matters more than factual reality
the foundation of reliability that must needs
a resonation that impinges sheer intent
the answer echos, to break the news.

Disasters and threats to life and homeland
Natural outcroppings of chaos gone sleazy
cheesy versions valued better than rest
made bite size and dumber for the mass.

We listen to the echo in all that hollow
and mistake the source of our attention
lacking consciousness of the resonation
and the possibility of our own evolution.

Simplicity is simply not enough for this
empty tea cups filled with master's tea
was never real except to the one mind
where simple beginnings are complex.

The echo reigns harmonic sorrows
with every failed fullfilment made
keeping such sounds that promise
garden seeds are meant for harvest.

All efforts remain mistakes in the end
as every mass misses what resonation
raises germane beneath the surface
so afraid of chaos that truth is lost.

6/10/09, rj

My journey into Yoga

I've been grinding online over meditation and Tantric info. I'm learning bit by bit, but the next step is to visit Ariel's puja (recurring gathering) and see if I'm accepted. One of the major things I read earlier today was how the Transmission of Tantric enlightenment is given by the woman and the man has basically no control over his initiation, it is up to a goddess to make the invitation.

I wonder if I have violated that code past redemption? It's very interesting looking back to recognize the resistance I felt when re-pitching my proposal and whatever was undoubtedly directly expressing a real conscious attitude on her part.

I'll have to ask.

The Romantic Prospect

For second there I thought, could this be possible? After the first few romances in life, the idea or possibility splits and evolves into what happened and the times that fooled you. Faced with the pain of having been fooled, developing sensitivity to one's own weaknesses or limitations in the matter becomes important, just like everything else in life.

My latest opportunity to grind on this is in full swing right now. From the very beginning, I was haunted by starry visions and what not, the usual thing. And, suddenly, there has been an enormous quiet just after I turned up the volume. I don't recall this being part of the dance before, and while a pause may represent a prior committment, without that it represents at least some degree of flakiness which doesn't represent the level of goddess which I can ally myself with.

To recap then, starry eyed adoration isn't necessarily a precursor to anything, and is certainly one of the biggest weaknesses I suffer in this life. The realization that I cannot just give it up ethically for the very thing that matters most to me: Love, hurts.

But there it is, my very own heart lies to me, and would lead me into the abyss of oblivion in the bat of an eye. To survive then means setting aside my deeper desires until certain conditions have been verified to exist. And, in this paradigm of romantic desire, discovering women with potential but unable to satisfy such an important role is atrocious, however I don't have to suffer with them anymore. This is my wish, and at least I can tell myself things are better because I know what I've avoided in the long run by suspending my desire.

Is there a higher road than this remains a question.

And now, here you are, a goddess ...

Goddess I Love

So much labor that amounts now to dust
All love and light played to your beauty, a crush
And yet you are even more perfect tonight
In little picture’s hush, I have always known this
And how overwhelmed I am by your essence.
With you in my embrace, I contemplate bliss.
That state of reaching the very thing missed.
Beautiful Goddess of Sacred Light, I love you.

July 2000

Feeling the Crest of a Wave

All the signals, facts, circumstances which I'm finding in my process of discovery associated with a healer I've chosen and the spiritual disipline of tantra itself are amazingly synchronous and overwhelmingly symbolic for a major transformation in my life. I'm still carrying around the baggage of my past failed love affairs at this time however, and will continue to do so until I get to spend some time with Ariel and determine the reality of what she may or may not have to offer me. The resurgence of hope is always a bad sign I think, one to signal a careful examination of to just what degree mechanical mind is responding to the idea of leaving behind this desert in my existence.

After spending several days now researching many different points of view about Tantra, I have the impression that it could very easily be the best next step for me to traverse given its focus on the male female sexual union as primary and at the core of what is spiritually possible. I have to admit though to having some fairly permament resistence to the elements making up its history, a story which is a overdramatized metaphor for the insights and realizations which together went into that body of wisdom at that time.

Ariel is the most beautiful goddess I've encountered yet, all fresh and innocent, and clearly not expressing her creativity over the top, oversaturation seems so much of the time to be part of the female model. Anyway, I have nothing else yet on tap as far as self development, AND this is really something I can't afford to correct but haven't a clue about as yet, for now.

My Answer to Marketing

In response to a marketers claim that they need to stop overwhelming social networks with marketing and lead in with relaxed just be yourself method, as his good idea for how to be better a marketer, my answer was this...

Sounds like code for "Don't Let them see you coming!" Someone earlier was observant when they talked about being context sensitive, and your idea certainly tries to slip on that hat, except the reality seems to still remain that of trying to pound a square peg in a round hole.

I don't have a solution here for ya, but I'm very clear that marketing doesn't work for me, especially on the web. The communications are uninvited, unwanted, invasive, and hiding all kinds of unwanted attachments and probes, etc., etc. that rob me of my liberties.

Any honest assessment over the evolution in web technologies will immediately reveal that what was in ithe beginning a true breakthrough for humanity, creating the space for their personal communications to global, it has long since been bought and turned by corporate greed and corruption.

Your like the original gangsters who would pop in to collect and exhort monies, calling it protection money. That's a clear violation of freedom, and I don't see any difference between that and what drives and ultimately produces today's web UI.

Scorecard

A good video on Love and relationship is on YouTube just got posted, find at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AqAEfBMlJoc

A wide view of contemporary views from deep in the academic expertise to anecdotes from those stopped on the street.

Up late again tonight surfing online. I have serous doubts about my ability to network well online given what happens everytime I go online. With respect to my current interest in moving into new communities and making significant steps in that area online, can't seem to plug in at all. Instead, I have several bad tastes in my mouth over issues that are pet peeves of mine about what I find online, and are conditions which are what they are and will always be that way or worse. No, for me, I need to stay conscious about my committment to community and then proceed to participate with those communities in exactly the way that will satisfy me to do so.

A major fact of online interaction with others is now an almost constant and always greater bait and switch foreward which is based on a design of call for action. That action is invariably one for money!

MONEY! I have some serious and unmoveable issues with this element present across the internet and how its expression corrupts the possibilities of a global conscious link to life for constantly scratching the walls for anything money that can be mined there. If you buy into the intrinsic value of money then you're the vanguard of the internets marketability and business value.

For those who are all about money, this technology is driven by cash at its very core, the energy to run in it costs money. So those who make the investment, they have advantages in terms of their access and power over the operation of the internet and thish leads them to introducing profiteering in precisely that place of human affairs in which it can do the most damage.

That damage is taking the wisdom of our ancester's and our own possibliities of evolving in applying that wisdom consciously and continuing to learn from it, taking that and hiding it away.

It boggles the mind how nothing today appears any better or supportive for my own need to wake up and evolve myself consciously on higher levels of being. Everything actually seems quite worse for the wear, with small periods of calm now, then, and again, like the video on Love at YouTube I spoke about at the beginning of this entry.

Right now, begin single seems like a blessing. Part of me remains quite upset about this condition still being present in my life at age 50. Zen, tantra, 4th way, art, music, golf ... pretty much sums up my interests for now.

Execution Kills

Is this bigger
you know the yells
some that had gall.

Just because of fade
some resonation
produces today.

Oh, I am ready!
Your the one in need
I will regret or kill.

Here in the trough
the depth equals the height
and the light retreats.

Just the new shadow
always a good wank
to crumble so well

Your travel ends here
in this right bright moment
suffer you slut and wonder.

And, until the day I die
must I continue in this
hissing melancholic climb

I only regret through time
evil will find BETTER skill
He learned execute THE kill.

I mostly just mosey along
with room to fart clean air
Avoiding that rot is a key.

Maybe I'll show you mine
sometime that winds prime
And a real love that's free.



6/11/09 Rjd

Divination or Round of Roll

Title of this poem is Round of Roll, referring to the essence of the write from which it came, however Divination being a previous title which was left unfinished in content actually impresses me as having a very strong connection worth contemplating now....and for the poem


Nothing matters more than factual reality
the foundation of reliability that must needs
a resonation that impinges sheer intent
the answer echos, to break the news.

Disasters and threats to life and homeland
Natural outcroppings of chaos gone sleazy
cheesy versions valued better than rest
made bite size and dumber for the mass.

We listen to the echo in all that hollow
and mistake the source of our attention
lacking consciousness of the resonation
and the possibility of our own evolution.

Simplicity is simply not enough for this
empty tea cups filled with master's tea
was never real except to the one mind
where simple beginnings are complex.

The echo reigns harmonic sorrows
with every failed fullfilment made
keeping such sounds that promise
garden seeds are meant for harvest.

All efforts remain mistakes in the end
as every mass misses what resonation
raises germane beneath the surface
so afraid of chaos that truth is lost.

6/10/09, rjd

Social Places

This morning I'm reeling with how little support I had for my health growing up. Other than the mediocre habits of diet and the abysmal mental practices I received from my family, I had only the grit of my own being. As I have begun to see that power of resistance fade and fail at the age 50, the possibilities I lost and never even suspected growing up, the enlightment and knoweledge, the blessings my forefathers left me in a repository of wisdom rarely seen except for echos and refrains emitting a shine where everything else in life casts a shadow.

This old programming, the influence of the past, I choose to free myself from. Time to work however. I have a job.

~Gravity Rose

Originally written in May, 2004, rev May 2009


My pricked and bleeding flesh
from a thorn's rosey afront…
Betray beauty in a brutal flora.
Tears flush the burnt coral I smell.

The fault and pain made mine...
remains of innocent opposition
buried by collapse, bad recoil that
pride did need, denying the darkness.

Love infatuated ruins the innocent,
just like water negates the fire of flames.
Neither life, nor innocence, contest
the inevitable demise, of romance.

Until then, you and I, dance
the tragic heartbreak tango
wounded by stakes lost in storm.
Our steps now soaked on flooded floor.

With a saving grace, context
teaches mobius tricks exist
whereby openings are closures,
revealing sources beyond sublime.

My sadness grows with regards
to tender nostalgia over the worst
requited release in the evil of love.
A soul destroyer, with noisey word rattle.

Her articulation of my failure, now
years passed, razes just as bad.
And any hope of change betrays
the word pricks that remain.

Grown up, a better man,
her words struck in scars.
How I live feeling that wrong
keeps me up late still, injurious.

Our life's blooming rose path
some are lucky just to hear
of, grave my warnings, if lame
as I gravitate this read anyway.

Of her earlier thorns...
I never understood her pain
only later, when I was safe
from our demonic side-effects.

I cut her off in a pass, so my bad
she decides, and our world ended.
Plain and simple, in a boy slamfest
better maimed than roadkill she said.

My anger was exchange of discredit.
A word assault to strike and probe.
That layer is groundwork of challenge.
Tomorrow's sober stories will tell.


Copyright © 5/17/04, RJDuberg
Revised 5/30/09

Zen Insight

The zen master, pouring tea, says to his student, "Your mind is like this tea cup, unless you master the art of emptiness, there will be no room for anything new." And, with that, the teacup began to overflow with the tea from the master's pot, falling to the ground.

I love this analogy because I have lots of personal experience of having a mind running in so many different ways that focusing has become less and less defined and possible in my estimation as my ability to skillfully energize its presence increases. The best way to describe it is watching a continual skipping from track to track creating a flow of life analogous to the sound such actions produce on a turntable when one plays their favorite LP.

Creating emptiness then is fundamental to receiving anything. This must then be the first step towards attaining reality and a complete being.

Following Artists

Don't have a writer to speak of. Listening to Dave Matthews right now, thinking of JLightner, a roommate, who just flew to see him thousands of miles away, play in New York. Tonight, I had fun watching/listening to comedic stand-up.  Ellen DeGeneres, P. Oneal, Craig F, even Tom Hanks was entertaining on cue with David Letterman.

The real story here remains the international economical crisis. There just doesn't seem to be any end to the limits our plans find pertinent and real. The machine doesn't exist anywhere except in our minds along with varying instructional accounts for its operation. Except here, under democratic rule, such social flaws were supposed to stop. Actually, we only succeeded in shining a light into our bottomless capacity to live the machine when our freedom has been attained.

I'm still thinking about how to channel my anger towards my family situation. So far, I've only succeeded in echoing the dysfunction and lived a series of intimate relationships designed to break my heart and create a feeling of being abandoned. I've got that one down, and I no longer am surprised when this demon raises its ugly head in my world and life anymore.

So it goes...

Along with this media swarm, there is the instinct to choke on all the dirt. Let me just say that without acknowledging my responsibility for the amount of dirt in close proximity to my person as being equal or greater, I would not be honest in speaking about that beyond my reach.

Oh yeah, I almost forgot to note a recent observation regarding the value this personal blog actually has for me. There's something empowering about writing one's internal story out when one stays conscious of public access to its read. The focus and the result is completely different than identical literary aims I've had lacking this readership dimension. What is that difference?

In my head the difference has to do with something being read, and my influence over that event. Now with respect, I find this takes work, and I often seem less than competent or skilled in the task, but regardless.

I speak to love and listen for it, and yet my life fails to unfold in any sensible manner or reason. The answers exist but believe me when I say they do not make any difference with respect to the experience of one's being this way. This jumbled and unfocused thing is all I have and all I get, and this knowledge as well was supposed to be of great influence in some transformational context, but biting only resulted in my being hauled out of my flow. What is outside of one's flow is no less as valid and yet being outside the flow it remains foreign and insubstantial to life within the flow.

And, finding myself unable to carry anything else into this entry, I close. Hootie's Blowfish makes timeless into music for me now.

Family Remains

While my father's previous wife to my mother's marriage and my birth has been problematic for me due to her insane and disruptive behaviors, the reality for me in the larger perspective has been no less crazy and broken down. She has over the years done some truly heinous evil deeds and I could attach all responsibility, at least for the most part, on her. Thinking about my value for my father however, I can imagine how his infidelity to her with my mother, conceiving me with my mom while he was still married to his previous wife could cause that woman the worst even unimaginable kind of female wrath. Reasonable at least where without such understanding I've only suffered the dregs of confusion and resentment against all manner and type of target, credited with guilt by simple association, imagined or real.

The breakthrough in this change of perspective puts responsibility to a degree on my father's immoral act, and forces me to accept my existence as cursed karmically from being a direct result of his lack of integrity. While my mother and he declared me their love child, I am not so easily convinced in the righteousness of that reason.

However, my existence, to have meaning requires that I reconcile the betrayal somehow. That my conscious awareness regarding my suffering and its source relative to my lack of family support and security is maturing to the point of helping me calm my roll and eliminate inappropriate action and emotion(drama), existence remains an unanswered call for me, a void only a genuine purpose will fill.

Raising a family and enjoying the special reality and love a good family milieu provides seems entirely impossible for me at this time. That leaves me alone, I am what's left. From my father's early betrayal, all that is left for me is me, and I ask you, what can possibly exist for me in this life when all that might have been is lost? Even my luck is ruined by that karmic nightmare. I can't even have a decent time playing a simple game because luck is always against me.

Finding something I love to do occurs as a possibility only because there are things I like to do, like write. But, once again the karma card trumps everything else. I'm quite sure nobody cares or wants to read what I have to write or say.

Thus, I understand how the gravity of my life has favored instinctive levels of satisfaction. Eating, sleeping, mind altering substances, all manner of masturbations, etc.  Well, get some help you might say. Did all that, and yet, I know I have nothing else, so I must try again.

Things are never the way they seem

Eminem article in this weeks Entertainment Weekly reports that his post recovery performance and productivity is characterized by him knowing what he wants and how do go about getting it, and most importantly keeping a focus on what's needed and making it happen. I believe that's an oversimplification and worse a gross misrepresentation, designed and paid for by his managers in a behind the scenes conspiracy with the publication.

Or am I just biased by a skewed point of view regarding my own lack of being relative to that? One can and does know quite a lot about what they want. I think for most, underneath their states of denial and distraction, this much can be said to be true if not readily so. It's the knowledge of how to achieve those objectives and the report of an irresistable approach and effort, without error or failure, which I find a bit ridiculous.

Such statements I believe to be at best gross exaggerations and in truth idealizations which turn on dishonesty when presented otherwise.

What a good plan feels like...

It's amazing how much effort I waste planning because I don't create the appropriate feeling necessary to have a plan succeed. A good plan is one felt with confidence to work. Genuinely felt, ego has no part in this assessment, and such plans that are constructed by ego inevitably fail with the exception of abuses of power. That's another subject however for now, the main idea is a simple test one may verify regarding their plans which has to do with conscious awareness of their level of confidence in its success. Often, such plans arrive in our minds rather than get constructed, at least for  myself. I believe it would be a great evolution of my intellect if I could in fact construct such plans consistently.

This kind of reality check during construction, I'm hoping will help me develop more sensitivity towards planning successfully by choice rather by accident for the time being.

The Eocene Era

The question that comes to mind after watching some new Palentology about this age is this...

Does function follow form or not? Or, does form follow function? From what I'm hearing the functionality which emerged at this period in our history OWES its characters to the level and gestalt of the environment/world which was present, the specific ecological DNA of that moment. Not only is this the primary constraint to evolution as we so far have been able to observe and detect it, nothing really has changed and yet everything has changed. Now, is this because our world changes constantly. The answer to this question is about the essence of time.

Time is a series with no two moments being equal yet referring to a unity, two concepts which are mutually exclusive. And as much as I've left this paradox at bay behind the mysteries of irrational modes of thinking, the damn question deserves a rational door or point of access, don't you think?

Therefore what can we say regrarding the original or even originality itself?

Father's Resolve and lyrics by Sheryl Crow, Always on Your Side

"Always On Your Side"


My yesterdays are all boxed up and neatly put away
But every now and then you come to mind
Cause you were always waiting to be picked to play the game
But when your name was called, you found a place to hide
When you knew that I was always on your side

Well everything was easy then, so sweet and innocent
My demons and my angels reappear
Leavin' only traces of the man you thought I'd be
Too afraid to hear the words I always feared
Leavin' you with only questions all these years

But is there someplace far away, someplace where all is clear
Easy to start over with the ones you hold so dear
Or are you left to wonder, all alone, eternally
This isn't how it's really meant to be
No it isn't how it's really meant to be

Well they say that love is in the air, never is it clear,
How to pull it close and make it stay
Butterflies are free to fly, and so they fly away
And I'm left to carry on and wonder why
Even through it all, I'm always on your side

But is there someplace far away, someplace where all is clear
Easy to start over with the ones you hold so dear
Or are you left to wonder, all alone, eternally
This isn't how it's really meant to be
No it isn't how it's really meant to be

Well they say that love is in the air, never is it clear
How to pull it close and make it stay
Butterflies are free to fly, why do they fly away
Leavin' me to carry on and wonder why
Was it you that kept me wondering through this life
When you know that I was always on your side

-RIP Dad, I can't help but still weep for you even today, especially after listening to this.

RIP Maryland

Maryland is the name of a very old soul who died two days ago, a 15 year old cainine, all white, adorable bitch. She belonged to a friend and roommate, but too all of us who lived at Elkwood near the Pacific in Imperial Beach, she was our guardian master. She will be so very missed, may she rest in peace. Goodbye girl.

Finally, it's been about this...

The title of this blog holds the space though represents the process producing the words here which for me include a faded recreation of the evolving itself, thus only and actually from the past and ghosted over.

But, given the task to express one's vision or top goal or purpose for writing a book, and this blog being the closest thing I currently have to a book, I somehow managed to thread its beginning all the way back to my father's promise to me to inform me about life after death. That was 38 years ago and has yet to happen.

I can comfortably say that my life has been about that promise and its lack of fulfillment which I still relate to with a painstaking still patience but which I hide with all manner of ineffective initiative and action.

So then, to whom can I find help regarding this insight now? Perhaps no one will step forward without a bill and compensation, all of which creates a degree of suspicion about yet another treatment, change, etc. which you can well imagine I am exhausted by over the last 30 plus years of such trying efforts.

Sounds crazy to me but I cannot hide from the fact that what my life is about is seeking a means to resolve my father's lack of communication after his death. It is just to inconsistent with his having made the promise to me shortly before he died in my arms to begin with.

To attempt a positive spin perhaps I could say my life is about how touching death with one's heart is unwise without being able to completely let go of our former bonds to the life having just passed in our presence.

How to reduce this to the most powerful language is my current task before progressing it seems....

Tinkering with Stover, is it enough to delete by accident?

OMG! Using browser blog editor earlier today, I wrote a fairly indepth piece on the moment titled Now This... it was quick and fast but really an important look into my research into Tantra, but wait...

Tonight saw me switch over to review a earlier more intellectual influence named Jessica Stover, a creative talent quick to cite her literary contexts as relevant and classical elegance like that has never grown old for me. Anyway, here to enter something noteworthy before proceeding into the later hours of my night tonight, I clicked a button titled clear content before having published it to to my blog, thus losing a degree of value I deemed important regarding my wish to evolve my health and healing.

Now here I am with Stover's quote and praise for this insight which I have repeatedly every day regarding how I perform my tasks at the golf course and achieve a daily freshness which represents more importantly a ongoing refinement and greater efficiency in my production.

She refers to Nassim Nicholas Taleb, author of the The Black Swan: The Impact of the HIGHLY IMPROBABLE....and I excerpt on the following ...

" Random tinkering is the path to success. And fortunately, we are increasingly learning to practice it without knowing it--thanks to overconfident entrepreneurs, naive investors, greedy investment bankers, confused scientists and aggressive venture capitalists brought together by the free-market system.

We need more tinkering: Uninhibited, aggressive, proud tinkering. We need to make our own luck. We can be scared and worried about the future, or we can look at it as a collection of happy surprises that lie outside the path of our imagination."

In my experience there is a very concrete level to this phenomenon. And it has to do with achieving a level of productive expertise and repetitive competence which can carry a simple codex of steps to direct any layperson to recreate such competent productivity with some acceptable degree of imperfection. I achieve every other day in my routine tasks in outside service at CVGC. When I become unconsciously adept at performing, my first impulse after food, sex, and comfort is to "tinker" with the way. Generally, such tinkerings have a positive and negative impact, achieving some new potential path of action having inspired it in the first place, but such change causing the ordered roll at that moment to become imbalanced and different. Different how? To some degree the result changes which is the ultimate measure of any cause in the first place, that by gauging its effect.

What's interesting is how naturally my mind responds to such results in terms of assessing their value in terms of the ERROR which relates the change in effect. To correct that error becomes the meta-tinker phase of tinkering and is in my mind central to our creativity as it relates to transformation and breakthrough success.

So, it is that only ERROR gives way to SUCCESS and what we desire as the completed result. As new editions of completion via this process of error correction take place, the meta-phase of the process becomes conscious, its metaphysical value, the transcendence of illusion and dichotomy to integral processing and being clear in reality.

More later....

Gut Check to a Shocking Poem

A stunning poem and my comment for the record...

The price to pay...

I sat and watched her as she slept,
Her skin so ghostly white.
I saw as dark'ning shadows crept,
Escaping from the light.

The deathly Angel spread his wings
To take her soul away
As Heaven's choirs plucked gentle strings
In random disarray.

I watched her as her movement ceased;
Her body lay so still
As if the Angel had released
All suffering and ill.

At last I cried, my voice returned,
"Please stop, don't take her now."
The Angel looked, so unconcerned,
With boredom on his brow.

"Kill me," I sighed, "Kill me instead,
And I will take her place."
The Angel said, "But she is dead,
Look down upon her face."

I hoped that with the Saviour's grace
My plea could be allowed.
My tears were wet upon my face,
I pleaded long and loud.

"Her soul is free from sin and pure
But yours is dark and black.
Your words are childish, immature,
Why should I bring her back?"

The Angel's words were straight and true
But still I forced my plea.
Though he refused I tried anew
He must not disagree.

At last he smiled and held my eye;
"Your wish is in my hand;
I have decided to comply
But you must understand;

"Your life is ended as we speak
And she will live once more.
The tears have dried now on your cheek-
So let us count the score.

"You cannot take the vacant place
In Heaven where she'll dwell;
For you are doomed from now to face
Eternity in Hell."

Davidmm fro Poetry 4 Suzanne Blog 3/17/09

Hi David,

Just read your poem. I have to say that I haven't read or watched or attended such a simple and potent dramatic scene that I can remember in such a while, the overwhelming loss, the sacraficial offer, only to be wrecked on the turnabout twist at the end.

While I know this scenario is cliche, you had done such a nice job of recreating it, and in doing so with such a highly valued human sentiment bridging upon the mystical and religious, one never tires of such renditions which elegantly capture the essence of this spiritual drama, at least for me. Which leads me to speculate on your reason for turning this whole drama upside down as you did.

I can't recall any enduring stories in which a man (or woman) negotiates with a higher power to save and in turn sacrafice themselves which led to damnation. Clearly, there are reasons why describing the basic moral good upon which the whole heaven/hell dichotomy as it relates to human life rests.

And yet, reading the comments which came before, nowhere did I find anyone concerned with this basic violation of classic values either? So, then the question is, have I missed some new evolution of human spirit in which your reversal on one of the most basic of human spiritual values makes sense? If no, then I'm back to conjuring a more palatable foundation for this violation, per se. Maybe you can help me here if you feel inclined, for what might be the alternative to what I can only surmise as mischief for the sake of attention grabbing shock produced by such a departure from the norm or cliche?

As a last resort, I would suggest emphasizing or balancing such a orthogonal negation of a classic with an element of mystery, at least, for as every rule was meant to be broken (as such) even the most solidly accepted classics which remain unbroken rules to this day might still find themselves excused in some future evolution of human spirit. And, I think we must all agree to that, IE I don't believe a single individual of faith hasn't imagined how much more influential the good book would be if their beloved almighty weren't dispossesed with a little more reality and conherency and a lot less mystery and dogma.

The real irony of this poem has to do with your eloquent and powerful grasp of the drama revealing a depth of faithful involvement which must have been at least at one time serious, only to see it turned on its head, without any fanfare or blaring horn. Indeed, the poems complete reversal of the classic drama reveals a rare potential complete reversal of the author's past faith.

Yet, why am I so hesitant to raise this intuitive insight up as my conclusion? It's not that I doubt such reversals take place. Perhaps, it is because of all the reversals and their range to which I may attest to have encountered, nare I say can I remember one which didn't include a litany of wreckage associated with the process, including some degree of scarring as well? Should my intuition regarding the source of this work from your pen be near spot on I must exclaim my kudos for how you've left the usual unexpressed, first because I'm sure it was not easy, and second, because the result is infinitely more poetic in its simplicity and elegance.

On the other hand, you might have simply decided to twist this classic on a ruse, being more than faithful perhaps or simply mischevious. Perhaps, you may enlighten me, but regardless, it was certainly worth the read and afterthought, attempting to put the real story in proper perspective and its light of revelation.

Rjd

Inside "Focusing" work by Ann Cornell

The further I get into a book by Ann Cornell called, The Radical Acceptance of Everything, the more I see her work aligned in its efforts to what I've already come to embrace in the Fourth Way. There's no spiritual, historical background behind "focusing," but the success made by her and her colleagues greatly raises awareness in a way that repairs the wrong work and dysfunctionality of being human, rendering us the worst of machines. Concepts used for FOCUSING and those offered by the Fourth Way have completely different intents and exist on different scales of being. For the hearer, the ideas of focusing exist only insofar as are effective tools for direction and guidance for those engaged in the theraputic process itself. While Fourth Way concepts reveal an intellectual and descriptive mode or level of thinking about being human, Cornells concepts support a process between speaker and listener in which the listener is challenged semantically in precise ways which result in transformations to the awareness. The effect on awareness reflects a clearer and much wider field of reality we all seem pretty much blind to at present and in our past.

Just today, after reading anecdotes in which FOCUSING techniques were applied to obtain results, I found my own personal awareness significantly shifted. It's a very difficult process to withstand. In particular, the sorrow associated with recognizing how much of life is or was missed growing up. How unaware I was is overwhelmingly shocking as I see how I might just as easily been instructed as a child in a way leading to higher levels of awareness that we all actually need to be fully human and happy, in the first degree.

One of the most important distinctions I can offer at this time about the difference in the quality of awareness has to do with the idea of listening. The work of Cornell is all about focusing one's listening on what we have not been listening to and long ago forgot even existed. These PLACES and AREAS for which our awareness was withdrawn, continued to exist influencing us in such negative but hidden and unacknowledged ways.

So, now is the beginning of a real period of recovery in my life.

And all the time, while growing up, going to a psychotherapist, I was under the impression that I was either doomed or cursed in some way, somehow defective in my core and that my happiness was always going to be at best transient, always covering over the knowledge that in some permanent way I was not relevant to my world.

Well, with today's new insights among other recent ones, I have begun to feel encouraged to engage in relative work I can either devise or find to test out what's possible for the health and healing of my being-awareness. The core of it all is pure awareness, the evolution of it through higher consciousness. It's not really changing the process as much as it is evolving my ability to be aware, and in that higher awareness the process of life and its quality transforms by itself.

My issues, for now remain the same in general, though a lot of movement has taken place within these contexts in the last few days.  Family, love, money, health, happiness, liberty, justice, spirit, education. These remain my main and primary issues in life, today.

Now This...

My little space here to write and blog, quite the escape for my mind and it's unending editorials on my life. The analytical quality is what everyone who notices the seepage of this expression thinks about what I say. And thereafter, I am over-analytical, too-analytical, etc.

I certainly have a strong impulse to order and sort my language and relevant ideas, and the flow just happens to have taken me to well, here. I'm seeing a widening though and I feel that I can sublimate much of the overt expressions more and more. I think I'm beginning to succeed in sorting it all out where my thoughts have progressed to a space of health and possibility of the kind quite hard to "escape" from willingly, for any reason.

This brings me to my taste for modern celtic pop music and how it often carries a harmony of sorrow, the last vestiage of pain associated with loss and my memories. It is harmonic and that penetrates the pain with a shattering wellspring of renewed energy potential to which our life can begin again with dawn's early light.

Einstein's ideas on God

Einstein's REAL view on G-D:

1)  I want to know how God created this world. I am not interested in this or that phenomenon, in the spectrum of this or that element. I want to know His thoughts; the rest are details.

2)  Science without religion is lame. Religion without science is blind.

3)  My religion consists of a humble admiration of the illimitable superior spirit who reveals himself in the slight details we are able to perceive with our frail and feeble mind.

4}  The further the spiritual evolution of mankind advances, the more certain it seems to me that the path to genuine religiosity does not lie through the fear of life, and the fear of death, and blind faith, but through striving after rational knowledge.

5)  Every one who is seriously involved in the pursuit of science becomes convinced that a spirit is manifest in the laws of the Universe-a spirit vastly superior to that of man, and one in the face of which we with our modest powers must feel humble.

## The scientists' religious feeling takes the form of a rapturous amazement at the harmony of natural law, which reveals an intelligence of such superiority that, compared with it, all the systematic thinking and acting of human beings is an utterly insignificant reflection.

6)  There is no logical way to the discovery of elemental laws. There is only the way of intuition, which is helped by a feeling for the order lying behind the appearance.

7)  The intuitive mind is a sacred gift and the rational mind is a faithful servant. We have created a society that honors the servant and has forgotten the gift.

8)  The most beautiful thing we can experience is the mysterious; It is the source of all true art and science.

9)  We should take care not to make the intellect our god; it has, of course, powerful muscles, but no personality.

10)   Whoever undertakes to set himself up as a judge of Truth and Knowledge is shipwrecked by the laughter of the Gods.

11)   When the solution is simple, God is answering.

12)   God does not play dice with the universe.

13)   God is subtle but he is not malicious.

14)  A human being is a part of the whole, called by us Universe, a part limited in time and space. He experiences himself, his thoughts and feelings as something separated from the rest-a kind of optical delusion of his consciousness. This delusion is a kind of prison, restricting us to our personal desires and to affection for a few persons nearest to us. Our task must be to free from this prison by widening our circle of compassion to embrace all living creatures and the whole nature in its beauty.

15)  Nothing will benefit human health and increase the chances for survival of life on Earth as much as the evolution to a vegetarian diet.

16)  The man who regards his own life and that of his fellow creatures as meaningless is not merely unfortunate but almost disqualified for life.

17)  Peace cannot be kept by force. It can only be achieved by understanding.

18)  Only a life lived for others is a life worth while.

19)  The human mind is not capable of grasping the Universe. We are like a little child entering a huge library. The walls are covered to the ceilings with books in many different tongues. The child knows that someone must have written these books. It does not know who or how. It does not understand the languages in which they are written. But the child notes a definite plan in the arrangement of the books---a mysterious order which it does not comprehend, but only dimly suspects.

20)  The important thing is not to stop questioning. Curiosity has its own reason for existing. One cannot help but be in awe when he contemplates the mysteries of eternity, of life, of the marvelous structure of reality. It is enough if one tries merely to comprehend a little of this mystery every day. Never lose a holy curiosity.

21)  What I see in Nature is a magnificent structure that we can comprehend only very imperfectly, and that must fill a thinking person with a feeling of humility. This is a genuinely religious feeling that has nothing to do with mysticism.

22)  The finest emotion of which we are capable is the mystic emotion. Herein lies the germ of all art and all true science. Anyone to whom this feeling is alien, who is no longer capable of wonderment and lives in a state of fear is a dead man. To know that what is impenetrable for us really exists and manifests itself as the highest wisdom and the most radiant beauty, whose gross forms alone are intelligible to our poor faculties - this knowledge, this feeling ... that is the core of the true religious sentiment. In this sense, and in this sense alone, I rank myself among profoundly religious men.

23)  The real problem is in the hearts and minds of men. It is easier to denature plutonium than to denature the evil spirit of man.

24)  True religion is real living; living with all one's soul, with all one's goodness and righteousness.

25)  Intelligence makes clear to us the interrelationship of means and ends. But mere thinking cannot give us a sense of the ultimate and fundamental ends. To make clear these fundamental ends and valuations and to set them fast in the emotional life of the individual, seems to me precisely the most important function which religion has to form in the social life of man.

The Existence of God

Einstein said, "My position concerning God is that of an agnostic. I am conv inced that a vivid consciousness of the primary importance of moral principles for the betterment and ennoblement of life does not need the idea of a law-giver, especially a law-giver who works on the basis of reward and punishment."

"The fairest thing we can experience is the mysterious."

My comment is ...  I hear Einstein's arguement against the existence of god as a direct result of his idea that man's higher possibilities in general are directly related to his having higher levels of consciousness, and that these are independent of any idea or belief in God. The arguement then is that if what is possible is available independently of the idea of god then that necessarily invalidates the existence of God, because in a world where nothing changes of value when the idea of the very source of value is removed, then that source must not exist. For, it's very definition doesn't allow it to when it becomes unnecessary.

IE Would God ever be observed just chillin or hanging out, IE Existing? No, therefore, God does Not exist.

Along the High Road

Traveling along a higher path isn't something I've considered part of my fate. That choice appears to me to require a kind of intuitive revelation which sacrafices diffuse being, for lack of better terms.

I can hardly think of a single moment when my haze of being hasn't been fairly dominant in the circumstances surrounding my travel process. After a little review of the situation however, I found that I do have some organizing aims which have become dormant and inactive. My conscience screams against this as a correctable violation of my heart.

I must include the rather humbling discovery that regardless of what remains a resource for a higher fate, my mechanicalness resists and opposes my interest in reactivating enthusiasm for my most valued aim in life. Instead of being depressed and clueless however, when the pain of my wretched state becomes overbearing I know in a minimally solid way how to succeed in overcoming that grey area. The essence of depression and its relation here for me has a lot to do with having no option or choice alternative to what otherwise has developed over time in my life as methods for escape.

Now, instead of escaping the confusing haze, I have a small map which I'm certain will take me far beyond and higher than I have ever gone.

And, it all seems very centered in consciously cultivating relationship networks, to both support my evolution and skill in interpersonal relations as well as expand my contacts which will then result in ever increasing happiness from an empowered state of fate.

It's What You Want

Hey...spent the weekend in a chill, as if anything is new around here to write about, right? Well, I did crack open a book called, The Radical Acceptance to Everything. It was a good echo or perspective on suffering and its offer on how to respond, to heal ourselves and others. I'm definitely going back for more.

I also spent a few minutes listening to some podcasts by a local Tantric Goddess (don't know all the particular distinctions in that disipline and study, so forgive me if she's called something else) named Devi, which brought me to a higher state above the bored and fearfully defeated state of apathy which I have been looking directly down the barrel at, more and more. That event horizon's darkness was as close in recent days as I've ever known it to be, and the little reading I did was spot on with respect to options and changing the direction of my being.

Small steps are still steps, they matter just as much as big steps. That's why it's important never to judge one's amount of progress in the negative, except in very very special cases having to do with turns and turnabouts, etc.

I heard from an old flame as well! I still love Stephie deeply, mostly for her grace and intelligence, but almost certainly as much for her feminine charm and poise. Her love helped me to withstand the loss of confidence in my aging mother. Maybe next week I will feel better and up to the task of yelling at her (mom) over the phone just so she can hear me. Sounds funny doesn't it, but if I don't yell she can't understand what I'm saying. She no longer writes or emails, communication, has all but ceased to take place between us.

To remember monuments in one's past which no longer exist in life has been a new mode for me lately, and I still haven't understood what I'm supposed to see or feel in regards to these kinds of memories. Mostly what I get is simply how different those earlier days were, and how opportune they were compared to what is taking place today. There is a balance to this however. The attitude which was missing then, I have begun to consciously develop today, even while the possibilities which they so deserve remain chained to my memory.

That's enough irony from this greybeard tonight. Peace and Love.

The non-expression of negativity

Anger wastes energy, our being, composes itself with ambient biological energies, though; capable of spiritualizing a soul through transforming energy, any wasted energies that our defects in character routinely and mechanically leak, should be understood unnecessary and opposed to one's real possibilities in this lifetime.

The true path of conscious evolution for man is through his learning to use his functions in a way to maximize what resources he has which may be applied and traded or consumed towards the goal of an evolution of self in higher consciousness.

I expect the reader to question just how much can be expected in the aftermath of any work aimed at precisely this goal, that of sorting out and healing the functions of our being, so that integrity is restored and energy isn't wasted. It's not easy to stop the wrong work of our being, to recover from negative expression in the expression of negativity but is easily one of the biggest steps towards the conservation of needless loss in our being, of energy needed to lay the foundation and bedrock to what's possible.

The only way to create higher being is through applying the energy for that higher being, available in raw form and limited quanitities, to our conscious self awareness, transforming it. The higher form of energy created using what little intent and attention we have to self-remember and contain what losses we are experiencing, allows for higher levels of consciousness which by definition must be based on non-mechanical being. For most of us this is a huge contradiction in terms as we 've grown up identifying our self and who we are with mechanical levels of the gross materiality as our soul passes through life since higher conscious levels are simply to hard to identify for the common individual.

However, without fail, most newborns forget who they are and any previous spiritual work and power they might have developed, and see themselves only in projections they make out in the world surrounding them with the help and guidance of their parents.

Through this process, such base levels of our energetic being bind and conentrate to form much higher potencies to start with, and also misunderstood and misused.  the given amounts of personal energy available for us and within us as we begin this work is quite small and incapable of being properly contained and consereved, especially in the beginning. My aim has nothing to do with sleep, or the drama of life which diverts the higher being from the brush fires that exist and about which not many care about or wish to provide any kind of solution for.

Transformation of our central energy of being takes time. Whereas, its loss can take place in a matter of moments with the right circumstances availalbe. At that time, sleep really does race to meet us, and our most important perspective in life, the condition of our work for pay can suffer wildly.

Over time, if one works well, the amount of effort required to maintain certain kinds of focus and attention consciously becomes noticeably smaller. The quanitity of energy we are focusing with our attention actually isn't becoming smaller but rather our personal power is rising.

Ultimately, our higher consciousness is a gift we receive from even greater heights of conscious being, while the energy transformations eventually go through a periodic cycling of storage before becoming needed or useful to our being's evolution. There are crossroads, grades, special needs and conditions requiring varying accumulations in order to leverage our progress as needed. These moments come in a harmonic accord with higher beings dedicated to our evolution and our based on what resources we have to meet such challenges as our pools of transformational resources are capable of. Successful challenges test the gain with loads quite outside but specific to internal structures of support. And, without the accumulated resources of transformation, our beings would lack what possibility they had at that moment for whatever powers of higher consciousness might be acquired.

So, we aim never to express negativity, and to succeed at this of course one first needs to understand negativity itself and just when and where how we express it as mechanical levels of being are fated to do. A careful examination will reveal an incredibly wasteful mechanical being for most people, which is entirely unknown, misunderstood and unconscious to them.

Yet Another Version Cue, Sticking in my Craw

"If one advances confidently in the direction of his dreams, and endeavors to live the life which he had imagined, he will meet with a success unexpected in common hours."

Henry David Thoreau (1817-1862)

Plugging Along

The only plug I have right now is my collection of chinese fine art. Other things I'm focusing on besides my little job at the golf course, don't really qualify as plugs or serious, even though I think I spend most of my time with them.

That will change soon if I want to see more progress in this lifetime. A new plug I have to add to the list is a program of recovery which might also be expressed as a support group or network, maybe including a personal coach or organization??

The obstacle to focus, in our life

The natural field of play that can be considered life, the contextual understanding includes everything encountered in process. What complicates and corrupts the inclusion requires a rigorous analysis in order for one's understanding to not suffer the same corruption possible.

The idea I have is to make distinct this dimension in the process as a source of disintegrative and negative influence or energy on the process as a whole while giving the opposite impression. How is this possible in nature? The idea that our minds and our best judgements cannot be fooled doesn't argue well in our defense against such possibilities. It is precisely this intrinsic flaw in our being which accounts for and supports the possibility of an obstacle, especially when compounded by our illusions and counterproductive responses.

One of the key notions making up the idea of 'the obstacle' is how often we choose to douse its metaphorical fire with gasoline out of an illusion giving us only the idea that there is some hope when our response lacks any clarity or committed action to resolution whatsoever. Such is the essence of corruption, it results from the misguided and undisciplined use of imagination, on every level, both for us mentally and also in a complimentary form belonging to the essence of nature itself.

I would offer a preliminary area to do your own inquiry into this subject for yourself, using addiction as the perspective on understanding with the focus squarely angled towards what essentially generates the obstacle at its worst, essentially by our own failure to recognize the mistake of our own responsible for our condition of suffering.<

Focus of Tennis

Watching the Austrailian Open 2009 Men's Final between Nadal and Federer takes you into a dimension of focus requiring stamina. The quest of life however is not so different, just currently lacking in focus but making up for that with ever increasing stamina (longevity).

The real choice of ours is whether we balance focus for ourselves in life.

Branden's Heroism

One of the forms of psychological heroism that builds self-esteem is the willingness to tolerate anxiety and uncertainty in the pursuit of your values-whether those values be work goals, the love of another human being, raising a family, or personal growth.

– Nathaniel Branden

Hymn to Angel SLP

Ooooh the sound of intoxicating suds
so needed then and more-so now
least considered keeps a door closed
the opening of which is chosen.

you say that its affordable
the feeling of guilt by association
encompasses the idea under what if
and shall I explain or not.

Our mind's eye pays in pain
so our lives relieve a shadow
where the brightness of the sun
finds a place of nearness to us.

Let her come by, for a peekaboo
but don't be surprised, who shows.
Awakened by a nurse must be positive.
It's the doctors you need to avoid.

Understanding how angels only serve
after being convinced their snots.
Adorably difficult right in private,
helping us to get back on our feet...

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