This is the Infinite speaking

Essay by Oscar Wilde

2012-02-07T02:05:00.000+11:00

The following is, to my thinking, the best of Oscar Wilde's writings, where his intellect climbs a step higher than the sardonic moral protests of his witty plays or the sentimental and teenagerish worship of aesthetics in his stories:
http://www.naturalthinker.net/trl/texts/Wilde,Oscar/thesoulofman.htm
It is titled, "The Soul of Man", an essay in startling contrast with the mountains of modern misfits insightlessly mouthing on political systems.

Kierkegaard's conception of Christ

2011-11-28T23:19:00.001+11:00

Really, the only weakness in Kierkegaard's writing is that he didn't keep strongly pointing out what he meant by Christ. It is very easy for people these days, who call themselves Christians, to interpret his ideas about relying on Christ, in the light of their customary Christian views.

That is, they read Kierkegaard with the same old mawkish, saccharine attitude to Christ that he spent his life criticising.

Unfortunately, Kierkegaard doesn't always bring home that criticism, when it is needed. He got lazy. He expected people to have finally got the message. But they haven't. The situation is far, far, far more advanced than in his time.

So, I have to publish an amendment within his proposal below:

A Proposal to Put an End to All the Nonsense about How One Enters into Christianity
In regard to all existential knowing, the main thing is to bring about the situation. This is what people have completely forgotten, and for this reason they cannot get an impression of Christianity.
I am thinking of a man who so far does not have any impression of Christianity and is not deeply gripped by the sense of his sin but lives on in the comfortable notion that he is still going to be saved.
Let him then take and read the New Testament. No one can deny that the ethical teaching presented here is such that it moves the imagination of every man.
Well, now, let him begin there. He carries out his intention to realize Christianity; for the present, he says, it makes no difference whether Christ has existed or not, who wrote the New Testament, etc.
And so he carries it out. But look, because he carries it out, he will in a Christian way collide with the world; he will be abused as an egotist just when he acts most disinterestedly, etc.
Now the pinch comes, now he cannot hold out alone — now he must have religious help. In order to hold out against the surrounding world he must have religious help. But not for this reason alone — he must also have it to hold out against himself. Simply because the world squeezes him so strongly, he must — in order to hold out by himself — be entirely sure at every moment that the error is not in him, that he perfectly realizes the good.
See, now the matter is in full swing; now he needs grace; now he needs Christ.
[By Christ, Kierkegaard does not mean a human version of an omniscient and all-powerful deity, that overly-imaginative psychological conception of a spirit guide which is the most popular and widespread conception of Christ. He is talking simply about being fully conscious of what a Christ is: a God-man. A God-man is both God (the formless Infinite) and, importantly, a conscious being (an advanced biological organism that can reason and be aware of God's nature, and live according to this truth). A god-man is God conscious of itself; all things are God, but not all things are conscious. So the religious need described above is the need of the sinner, in the thick of his impulse to sink into egotistical self-protectiveness, to remember his true nature as Christ. He is not seeking an external authority to guide him, but looks inwardly to recollect and build up in himself the Christ. — KJ, 28/11/2011]
This is Christianity. Let a person just begin seriously to will to realize it and he will soon learn to need Christ. Let him literally give all his fortune to the poor, literally love his neighbor, etc. and he will soon learn to need Christ. Christianity is a suit which at first glance and to the imagination seems attractive enough, but as soon as one actually puts it on — then one must have Christ's help in order to be able to live in it.
It seems to me that this is very simple. But this aspect of Christianity people have completely abolished. And yet this aspect is suggested in Christ's words: If anyone wills to do what I say, he shall experience etc.; he shall experience — yes, it is almost ironical, he shall first of all experience that he needs the help of Christ.

Thoughts on the 10 Bulls

2011-11-21T21:41:00.001+11:00

Kakuan's 10 Bulls has already been quoted in "This is the Infinite Speaking" several years ago. It is probably the clearest expression of this entire weblog's Idea, and is the most sturdy and shining enlightened song I've ever encountered. Nature sings with a crystal-clear voice in Kakuan's song.

Some sages playfully tempt me with the idea that Nature is a seductress, like a fashion-ecstatic woman who is playing dress-ups in her private boudoir, throwing on fashionable guise after guise, and modelling new draperies and dresses, new forms and ever-new forms, in an enthralled game of ongoing blind whimsical creation. They imagine Nature as the fun-loving siren, who laughingly lures us poor human fools into tripping into her enchanting, highly distracting, sensorial traps and forgetting the essential unholdability of Nonduality.

But the song of Kakuan reminds me what these sages seem to have forgotten: that us poor fools are Nature. Our own being-prone-to-delusion, our own flawed mental artifacts, our own karmic penchants for falling in thrall to the illusions, is also Nature. It is not that we are sinners, and Reality is pure. The sinning and forgetfulness --- the roaming of the mind, what Kakuan calls the waywardness of the Bull --- is direct experience of Reality. There is no separation, no division between Nature as a cruel puppeteer controlling our thoughts, and us, the helpless dancers-victims of Her play. No, no. That is all wrong.

To sum up what the crux of the truth is:

To see oneself rightly, see Nature first. See Everything is causality, Everything the Way. Purposeless or purposeful --- forget this. Don't look at Nature through the human, through the ego, through one's human needs. No, look and absorb into yourself first the emotionless wanderings of causality, then make this your self: that is really who you are. With Nature as Self, there is an end to the search. Then the human self has its place. Don't chase figments of the finite human self: you'll be chasing endless fantasies.

Here is the commentary of Kakuan's 10 Bulls again. Linger over it, study it deeply with all your being. Note, one stanza can represent the actuality of one's existence, that is, one's actual relationship to Nature, for many months. So, there is no sense in trying to read all the stanzas as if they could be learnt at once. Few people ever experience the first stage; the last is as rare as a perfect Buddha.

1. The Search for the Bull

The bull has been lost. What need is there to search? Only because of separation from my true nature, I fail to find him. In the confusion of the senses I lose even his tracks. Far from home, I see many crossroads, but which way is the right one I know not. Greed and fear, good and bad, entangle me.

2. Discovering the Footprints

Understanding the teaching, I see the footprints of the bull. Then I learn that, just as many utensils are made from one metal, so too are myriad entities made of the fabric of self. Unless I discriminate, how will I perceive the true from the untrue? Not yet having entered the gate, nevertheless I have discerned the path.

3. Perceiving the Bull

When one hears the voice, one can sense its source. As soon as the six senses merge, the gate is entered. Wherever one enters one sees the head of the bull! This unity is like salt in water, like colour in dyestuff. The slightest thing is not apart from self.

4. Catching the Bull

He dwelt in the forest a long time, but I caught him today! Infatuation with scenery interferes with his direction. Longing for sweeter grass, he wanders away. His mind still is stubborn and unbridled. If I wish him to submit, I must raise my whip.

To be continued...

Seek first the kingdom of God

2011-11-07T16:47:00.000+11:00

"Seek first the kingdom of God" — these words could be presented in such a way that one negatively examines everything else and shows that this is what one should not do, or in such a way that one shows that the first manifestation of seeking God's kingdom first is, in a certain sense, to do nothing; for to seek the kingdom of God first is at first the same as to renounce everything.

Seek first the kingdom of God. But what am I supposed to do? Shall I seek an office in order to be influential? No, first you shall seek God's kingdom. Shall I give all my fortune to the poor? No, first you shall seek God's kingdom and his righteousness. Shall I go out in the world as an apostle and proclaim this? No, first you shall seek God's kingdom. But isn't this in a certain sense doing nothing at all? Yes, to be sure, in a certain sense this is what it is.

— Kierkegaard

The foolish virgins

2011-10-23T22:08:00.000+11:00

The foolish virgins are not presented as having completely forgotten the bridegroom's coming; they are instead represented as having gone to purchase a new supply of oil — and yet they were excluded. Therefore one is not to excuse himself because he is, after all, doing something, occasionally thinking about the salvation of his soul, waiting for the publication of a new book, etc.

— Kierkegaard

Zarathustra returns, and speaks to a young man

2011-09-01T00:53:00.000+10:00

My brother,

Be watchful that you don't lose your step. I see you struggling to find a way to harmonise your love of idealism, with harmony with the world. But it cannot be done!

You suffer greatly because you are caught between the two: wisdom and worldliness. You want to help others, but you also want to be seen as a helper.

You have lofty visions and high-aiming ideals, but you relish also the taste of victory and conquering and supremity. Which one will win in you?

Your idealism and love for high-aiming ideals makes you jealous of your goal. But you are also jealous in another way: that your ideals might cause you to crumble into weakness and failure. This is the war within you, that you distrust your highest hope.

Be watchful that you don't lose your step. Your struggle is filled with suffering, because your love for truth is still a desire for worldly power and praise. My brother, you must choose.

I see that suffering is an evil to you: thus you wish to speak softly and mildly, with the compassion of a just God. You believe that to arouse to anger is a harmful act.

But if speaking plainly and truthfully your own simple thoughts causes others to fly into a rage, then you are not speaking to your own kind!

It isn't your lot to speak to buzzing and angry flies and wasps. Don't misjudge yourself: climb higher, above suffering, so that you fear suffering no longer.

Yes, speak of love if you must, but speak to your own kind, and speak of love of truth!

Don't seek the love and praise of followers and kinsmen; if you would be a friend, then be their enemy, dowsing them with basins-full of ice-cold sea-water!

Climb higher, my brother! I see you suffering with your need for companionship. But make reason and your wise thoughts your only friend, for they lead you surely to your goal.

Watch that you do not slip, with your jealousy and hate. These companions follow from your burning idealism; they are but shadows of a need for worldly success.

Flee into your solitude, my brother. Find truer companions in your reason and your wise thoughts. Watch that you do not slip, my dear brother.

Thus spoke Zarathustra.

Lightness - Heaviness

2011-08-03T00:25:00.000+10:00

Diese leichten thörichten zierlichen beweglichen Seelchen flattern zu sehen — das verführt Zarathustra zu Thränen und Liedern.
To see these light, foolish, delicate, beguiling little souls flutter — that moves Zarathustra to tears and songs.

Ich würde nur an einen Gott glauben, der zu tanzen verstünde.
I would only believe in a god that understood how to dance.

Und als ich meinen Teufel sah, da fand ich ihn ernst, gründlich, tief, feierlich: es war der Geist der Schwere, — durch ihn fallen alle Dinge.
And as I saw my devil, there I found him earnest, grounded, deep, fiery: it was the spirit of depression, — through him all things fail.

Nicht durch Zorn, sondern durch Lachen tödtet man. Auf, lasst uns den Geist der Schwere tödten!
Not by fury, but by laughter, does one kill. Up, let us kill the spirit of depression!

Ich habe gehen gelernt: seitdem lasse ich mich laufen. Ich habe fliegen gelernt: seitdem will ich nicht erst gestossen sein, um von der Stelle zu kommen.
I have learnt to walk: since then I let myself run. I have learnt to fly: since then I have not wanted to be urged beforehand, to get into place.

Jetzt bin ich leicht, jetzt fliege ich, jetzt sehe ich mich unter mir, jetzt tanzt ein Gott durch mich.
Now I am light, now I fly, now I see myself beneath myself, now dances a God through me.

— Friedrich Nietzsche, Also Sprach Zarathustra (Vom Lesen und Schrieben)

Walk before talking

2011-07-30T01:24:00.000+10:00

It would make excellent tragic material: the young man who, persecuted by Marcus Aurelius, inspired by the courage of Polycarp and men like him in the hour of their death, also wanted to be a martyr, but when confronted by horrible torture became afraid and cursed Christ as the pagans demanded. — From this one sees that it is the same in Christianity as it is in earthly life: one must first grow before God and men, and even though in our time we are not exposed to such great temptations which in a horrible way destroy everything, nevertheless embryonic theologians, for example, ought to take care that, by beginning to preach too early, they do not talk themselves into rather than identify themselves with Christianity and take the consequences.

July 11, 1838

— Kierkegaard

Commenting on journalism

2011-07-21T22:34:00.000+10:00

This comment was posted to Mike Tomalaris' interview with Cadel Evans after Stage 17 of the 2011 tour de France, on SBS Cycling Central (21/7/2011):

Interesting insight into the high-achieving athlete's psychology. The journalist keeps asking about emotional states, like "How do you FEEL?" "Do you feel x is bad or good?" "Has x made you angry / happy?" and so forth. But the athlete never answers these questions. Instead, he talks about principles, saying "I think..." "x is a situation with pros and cons" "x is an ideal, certainly, but we'll see how things go." The emotionalism wastes brain cells needed for solving problems efficiently.

The straight jacket

2011-07-14T21:22:00.000+10:00

To be a truthful, rational person living in conformity with society is just as impossible as doing gymnastics in a straight jacket.

Anxiety - Nirvana

2011-07-09T20:35:00.000+10:00

If a person could be entirely free of anxiety, temptation would not have access to him. - Soren Kierkegaard.

Samsara, the cycle of birth and death, is nothing more or less than desire for completion. To be free of desire is nirvana ("no-wind", the stillness of the nondual). - Kelly Jones

How to spot the difference between worldly wisdom and real wisdom (hint: the attitude to suffering)

2011-07-07T18:09:00.001+10:00

What the clergy preach is not far removed from blasphemy. Everywhere in life's trivialities they find analogies to the highest. Someone has had a loss, and presto! — the preacher refers to it as the Isaac whom Abraham sacrifices. What nonsense! Is loss a sacrifice? To sacrifice means voluntarily to bring a loss upon oneself. A man is sick, presto! — it is the thorn in the flesh.

— Kierkegaard

Incendiarism

2011-07-02T18:53:00.000+10:00

DECEMBER 1854

The Problem

So far removed, so distant is Christendom (Protestantism, especially in Denmark) from the Christianity of the New Testament that I continually must emphasise that I do not call myself a Christian and that my task is to articulate the issue, the first condition for any possibility of Christianity again.

It was incendiarism (this is how Christ himself describes his commission), it was incendiarism, setting fire to men by evocatively introducing a passion which made them heterogeneous with what is naturally understood to be man, heterogeneous with the whole of existence, an incendiarism which must necessarily cause discord between father and son, daughter and mother — in short, in the most intimate, the most precious relationships, an incendiarism with the intention of tearing apart "the generation" in order to reach "the individual", which is what God wants and therefore the passion introduced was: to love God, and its negative expression: to hate oneself.

It was incendiarism. But it is not always water that is used to put out a fire — however, to keep the metaphor, I could certainly say that Christendom is the water that has put out the fire. But, as mentioned, one does not always use water; sometimes one uses, for example, featherbeds, blankets, mattresses, and the like to smother a fire. And so I say that if Christendom is the bulk that has smothered that fire once lighted, it now has such an enormous layer of the numerical beneath it that Christianity may serenely and safely be made into just the opposite of what it is in the New Testament.

Whoever you are, if it is your purpose, your idea to do your bit to help smother the fire still more, then get busily involved in this massive popularisation, doing it under the name of spreading Christianity, and you will do as much harm as you can possibly do. But if you want Christianity again, fire again, then do all you can to get rid of the featherbeds, blankets, and mattresses, the grossly bulky stuff — and there will be fire.

The orders for busyness of that kind are: Away, away with abstractions: the state church, the folk church, Christian countries — for any effort of that kind is treason against the fire; they are the featherbeds and blankets that help smother the fire still more. But efforts of the kind that aims at dispersing, aims at "the individual," are the solution.

It was incendiarism. For the time being forget that, forget that this is Christ's own view of Christianity. From what you see to be Christianity here, would it ever even remotely occur to you that it was to set fire that the founder of this religion came to earth, would you not get the overall impression that it must have been to put out fire that he came to the world.

It was incendiarism — and nowadays Christianity is reassurance, reassurance about eternity in order that we may all the better be able to rejoice and enjoy this life.

As we all know, a person can get sick from a fetid stench; there are various other disgusting smells which a man cannot bear, from which he gets sick — but one can also get sick from stupid nonsense. And just as during plague or cholera the surgeon walks about and chews on something to prevent inhaling, so also one may well have a spiritual need for something in the mouth when one has to work incessantly against stupid nonsense. But there is the difference that for the surgeon inhaling may actually be dangerous, and for the other practitioner it is not harmful, may even be beneficial. For while man by nature wishes for what can give him pleasure in life, the religious person on active duty needs a proper dose of disgust with life in order to be fit for his task; disgust with life, taken properly (for the way it is used is crucial), is the best safeguard against getting involved in stupid nonsense.

— Kierkegaard, year of his death

The only error in Soren Kierkegaard's conceptualisation of God

2011-06-25T18:07:00.001+10:00

Kierkegaard's conceptualisation of Christ as God has a touch of illogicality about it, but this is the only fundamental error I've found in his thinking. Overall, he is among the wisest and most courageous men ever to exist, so in that context, his error is minor. But I am keen to expose any fault in conceptualisations of God, and his is definitely one.

God is spirit, or rather, the nature of Reality is not something in particular. That is what spirit means. It is emptiness of form. So, Kierkegaard rightly thought of Christ as spirit, since that is Christ's true nature.

But Kierkegaard did not see Christ as a human being who became enlightened, who was educated out of ignorance. He didn't see him as intrinsically God, beginning with the dull, unenlightened human state, and progressing to become wise. Instead, he saw Christ as intrinsically God, but beginning as God. He regarded Christ as the incarnation of God and therefore automatically enlightened.

What does this mean for his conceptualisation of God? It means that, on some level, he does not see human beings, and their finitude, as intrinsically God. He doesn't see their dependence on food and drink as spirit. He sees spirit as something other than human finitude. This is clearly an error, and it is possible that it caused him to suffer unnecessarily, by not making a clear distinction between a psychological dependence on finitude, which is what the spiritual life is all about overcoming, and finitude itself.

On the other hand, Kierkegaard was well-aware that his conceptualising was virtually always poetic. His approach to Christ was a psychological one, and he knew that. He knew all sinners in need of grace conceived of Christ as an immediate Savior, an idealistic icon, to restore the picture of living rightly. So it is possible that he knew he was overlaying the actuality of the God-man with the suffering and struggling sinner's picture of a perfect Savior. This basically means that the imperfect human conceives of perfection immediately, just like the perfect Buddha is present in the imperfect one: From one enlightened thought, another enlightened thought follows. So, given Kierkegaard mentioned how the image of Christ was manipulated in the needy sinner's mind to help them climb out of the mire of their ignorance, it is understandable that, in more troubled, depressed states of mind, his religious poetry and personified ideals got a bit out of hand.

— Kelly Jones

Eli Eli lama sabachthani?

2011-06-19T00:34:00.000+10:00

The words "My God, my God, why hast thou forsaken me" were understood as Nemesis, that he who had had so much in his power had not been smart enough to assure his own future, etc. If I were to talk purely humanly about it, it is as if Christ in his human nature had become so lost in the God-relationship that everything else was forgotten. It is an expression of being extremely close to consummation, this feeling for the last time of the chasmic depth of separation between being man and being with God; therefore, it is the final expression for what comes next — being blessedly with God.

— Kierkegaard, 1848

Meditation

2011-06-05T09:02:00.000+10:00

There are basically two kinds. One is focussed on enlightenment pure and simple, the other deals with psychological blockages to, and is based on, same.

Spiritual growth techniques are, in essence, based on reason. All the unique and infinite ways used to overcome psychological hindrances to living spiritually are inevitably unique to the individual. But all of them boil down to those two kinds of meditation: reason focussed on enlightenment, and reason focussed on one's own personal indispositions.

Working out how to deal with one's own personal bad habits and resistances to enlightenment is wholly up to the individual, adopting or developing from scratch their own personal medicines. Most difficulties one will face - after having developed sufficient bodhicitta (the sheer resolve to be truthful, no matter the cost, and accepting no excuses) - are conquered with straightforward introspection and courage. Breakthroughs are usually a matter of a series of tiny shifts building up like a trickle becoming a flood.

Resolve powers through all objections and paralyses.

Choice

2011-05-30T21:27:00.000+10:00

It is unbelievable how meager a conception of an essential view of existence men have. They live out their lives in tomfoolery. They go out into life saying: Perhaps I shall become a somebody, perhaps I'll be a nobody, perhaps I shall even be persecuted. What foolishness! Please, simply choose, and you do not need to guess; the specific conditions of existence can be calculated very well. If you will unconditionally risk everything for the good — then you will be persecuted, unconditionally persecuted, tertium non datur.

- Kierkegaard, 1847

To Have a Cause

2011-04-19T20:28:00.000+10:00

To Have a Cause

A. Lower forms

Because it seems good in the eyes of men, a sign of earnestness, etc., one speaks uninterruptedly about having a cause, about wanting to work for the cause, everything for the cause — and he has no cause except that of wanting to please men by his talk about having a cause. Such people have no cause but dress something up, a display mannequin which they coddle as if it were a child.
One has a kind of cause — but the cause, however, is consequential only to the point of gaining one's own advantage by having the cause.
One has a cause but supports it in every possible way by clubbing together etc.; one is happy when someone, even through misunderstanding, joins up, for although one has a cause, he wants to spare himself as much as possible, i.e., one wants to have a cause as little as possible.

B. Higher forms

Ethical irony and intellectual, unselfish interest, which have a cause to the degree that it is hidden in order to prevent the misunderstanding of being of help to someone.
The martyrs who suffer for the cause. They need have no fear at all of getting the support of men, because where there is suffering, men flee. But in any case, they are still careful to parry assistance through misunderstanding, if it should be offered, because the cause is to them unconditionally the absolute, the I unconditionally nothing. This is what it is to have a cause in the highest sense.

— Kierkegaard, 1851 (4 years before his death)

Angry reactions to living conscientiously

2011-04-19T20:04:00.000+10:00

When a person voluntarily exposes himself to dangers and loss for the sake of a good cause, people reproachfully say, "It is his own fault," and become angry with him. What are they angry about? It is because of the voluntariness, the fact that he is disinterested, that he scorns what they aspire to as the highest. One can hurt a self-loving person in two ways: as a thief, a robber, gossip, et al., one can take away from him his earthly goods, but one can also by disinterestedness and sacrifice take the value away from those goods, those goods which he values as the highest. Men get just as bitter about the one way as the other. It is also a kind of reduction when that which a person regards as supreme and which he possesses is not actually taken from him but is shown to be empty and worthy of disdain.

- Kierkegaard, 1848

Definition of 99.9999999999% of humans: "Someone for whom Truth means Money"

2011-03-10T23:13:00.000+11:00

How little resuscitation there is in life, after all, for one almost never gets a clear perception of the idea in an endeavor, but always mixed together with the illusions of finitude.

Let us take Hegel. How does he happen to become the great philosopher-author of seventeen volumes. Well, he probably had a pretty good head on his shoulders, was very industrious, and then he became B.A., M.A., and later professor — and now he begins to work. Now what call to life is there in this — always this triviality in the background: this is the way he makes a living. And then he probably makes money on his books — there we have it again.

To be sure, there is lofty talk that no one thinks about such things — well, maybe so, but it is the world's hypocrisy that at bottom it privately wants to have a shabby explanation of everything — and then talks in lofty tones. Make a test: place an endeavor right in front of people's noses (here in Copenhagen or wherever you want to), but a task which does not have a single illusion in it (neither money, office, honor, nor reputation), a task which, besides this, is so laborious and strenuous that one cannot speak of it as a kind of pleasure: and you will see, if people are encouraged in some way to express themselves completely openly, they will regard this man as crazy or so peculiar that he teeters on the border of insanity.

There is constant talk in the world about wanting only the truth, etc., but something else is always implied. A journal which seeks only the truth: well, this is regarded as all right if the journal has many subscribers, to seek only the truth in this way is understandable. And why? Because the great number of subscribers shows that it is earning a lot of money and that the journal must have a great influence. Think of a journalist who wants only teh truth, and consequently, if he originally had many subscribers, they steadily become fewer and fewer; at last he has so few that it is clear that he subsidizes the publication, and still he works just as diligently and industriously as anyone — and you will see that he is ridiculed or at least is regarded as odd.

Woe, woe, woe to these preachers who either are hulks who do not know how it all hangs together or are servile enough not to reveal it, fearing for their wages.

Opportunities come my way to discover this, even where I did not expect it. I can remember saying to Peter a year and a half ago: I believe I will give up being an author for good and start riding horses or something like that — and he answered (and with real earnestness): that would be the best thing to do. So purposeless, then, do my efforts seem to him. Had I become famous as an author, had I earned much money, then he would have said: You are not crazy after all.

— Kierkegaard, 1848

The bourgeois mentality

2011-03-07T14:28:00.000+11:00

"One should love his neighbor as himself," say the bourgeois, and by this they mean the well-brought-up children and now useful members of the state — those who have great susceptibility to every transient emotional flu — for one thing they mean that when someone is asked for a pair of scissors, even though he is some distance away, he will say "Righto!" and get up "with great pleasure" in order to fetch them, and for another that one will remember to pay the proper visits of condolence. But they have never felt what it means to have the whole world give them the cold shoulder, for the whole pack of social herring in which they live naturally does not permit such a relationship to occur; and then when serious help is needed, good common sense tells them that anyone who is in great need of them and in all probability will never be in a position to help them in return — he is not their neighbor.

— Kierkegaard, 1837

The Electric Dog Goes Buddhist

2011-03-02T18:56:00.000+11:00

This time, the Electric Dog was really down. None of his usual tricks and defenses worked. He tried to write a sensational bestseller, but could not get past a two-page outline. He wrote a revolutionary paper on drugs and the human mind, but no one wanted to publish it.

His worldly possessions dwindled to a futon, a laptop computer and a copy of the Dhammapada. He had no job and no home, and he managed to alienate most of his friends with his incessant complaints.

On top of it, his health was deteriorating; neither exercise, nor generous doses of multivitamins seemed to help. While the present was perfectly abhorrent, the future looked even bleaker.

What was he to do? Commit suicide? Get a straight job and go back to his girlfriend?

No, there was one last gambit he was going to try before limiting himself to such hard choices.

He was going to become a Buddhist.

He went to a monastery on top of a mountain where they taught mindfulness as a way out of life's misery. All one had to do was to watch one’s stomach rise and fall as one sat on a cushion for twelve hours a day. The delusions and desires of worldly life were supposed to slough off one's mind like so much loose debris. That sounded simple enough.

The Dog was so miserable and so determined to get rid of his misery that he actually engaged in this new method of finding happiness, quite conscientiously, for almost two weeks.

His buttocks hurt like hell. Instead of resting at night he had nightmares. Even the food, so eagerly awaited during sittings, somehow failed to satisfy him.

He was trying to get his mind to follow his breath--and whatever else was happening in his body — but the mind refused to be a trained circus pony and was bucking like a wild mare. It would only fall quiet in order to lull the Dog's suspicion and then throw him off its back all the more triumphantly.

Nonetheless, the Dog saw very clearly what a fraud he had been during his previous life. He saw the effects of his self-destructive and delusional thinking. He even learned how to, if ever so briefly, stop the restless meandering of his mind by watching his stomach rise and fall.

But to get beyond suffering or even beyond conflict about suffering or not suffering – that he could not do. He guessed that Buddhists, just like everyone else, were overselling their case.

One morning, he woke up with such a sense of desperation and hopelessness that the original choice of either getting a straight job and settling down, or committing suicide, reared its ugly head again.

That morning, he broke his usual routine, climbed up to the top of the mountain and sat there under a blue gum tree.

He resolved not to move until he could come up with the answer to his life's dilemma.

He sat there for what seemed like eternity.

Finally, strange energy began to pulsate through his body. He saw a brilliant white cloud descend upon him, illuminating the farthest recesses of his mind.

Just at that moment a bull ant bit him on his already sore buttocks. As the searing pain tore through his body, he experienced a blinding flash and a surging sense of enlightenment.

As his mind became more composed he perceived the meaning of his revelation: there were not four, but five Noble Truths of Buddhism. They went like this:

1. Life is a pain in the ass.
2. No matter how much you squirm, you are still going to get screwed.
3. The only way to deal with pain is to face it in life through action.
4. You are going to do everything possible to avoid facing truth No. 3, including learning all the tricks of meditation and the Buddhist jargon about the Four Noble Truths.
5. You can no more control your mind than you can control the movement of stars in the sky. But you can control people by teaching them how they can supposedly control their minds.

Who needs sex or possessions, he reflected, when you can have so much power?

The beautiful female acolytes will even put food into your bowl, so that you can become like a child (or a drone) before you enter Nirvana. You can watch junior monks go through mind-numbing rounds of meditation and walking which would even impress a drill sergeant. What's more, your charges would be doing it completely voluntarily. They would even try to outdo each other in their feats of submission and mortification.

The Dog found that among the aspiring followers of the Gentle One competition for merit, recognition, and power was even fiercer than in the society at large. Instead of greed, anger and ambition, steel buttocks, mental endurance and rote memory were the prerequisites for success. The Buddhist scene around him seemed to have as much to do with the original experience of Buddha as the sittings of the Vatican Council had to do with the wanderings of the unruly band of rogues who gathered around the rabble-rouser from Galilee.

The Dog got up from under the gum tree, gently rubbed the spot where the bull ant had bitten him, and started his descent from the mountain.

At first he thought that he would start teaching people the Five Noble Truths that had been revealed to him. But then he realized that people would not listen. They were so eager to give away their power for even a temporary relief from suffering via some second-hand guru or technique that they would ignore him and might even stone him.

The Dog stowed his futon in the van and started on the road leading back to town. He donated his copy of Dhammapada to the monastery's library. His buttocks still hurt but a vague sense of joy at having found his own truth was rising in his soul.

A butterfly skimmed over the road and landed on a gum tree. The Dog smiled. Why burn the house down just because it is going to fall over some day?

The butterfly seemed to be telling him, "Life may be short and full of strife and disappointment, but it is still worth living—with acceptance and grace."

At that point he became a Buddhist

— Pyotr Patrushev

http://pyotrpatrushev.blogspot.com/

http://patrushev-publications.web.officelive.com/Documents/Pyotr_Patrushev_buddhist_dog.htm

The Principal Rule

2011-02-28T23:00:00.001+11:00

Above all, read the N.T. without a commentary. Would it ever occur to a lover to read a letter from his beloved with a commentary!

In connection with everything which qualitatively makes a claim of having purely personal significance to me, a commentary is a most hazardous meddler.

If the letter from the beloved were in a language I do not understand — why, then I learn the language — but I do not read the letter with the aid of commentaries by others. I read it, and since the thought of my beloved is vividly present and my purpose in everything is to will according to her will and wishes, I understand the letter all right. It is the same way with the Scriptures. With the help of God I understand it all right. Every commentary detracts. He who can sit with ten open commentaries and read the Holy Scriptures — well, he is probably writing the eleventh, but he deals with the Scriptures contra naturam.

That is, while reading the letter you are occupied with yourself and your relation to the beloved, but you are not objectively occupied with the beloved's letter, that this passage, for example, may be interpreted in ten ways — oh, no, the important thing for you is to begin to act as soon as possible. Besides, should it not mean something to be the lover, should it not give you what the commentators do not have? Everyone is the best interpreter of his own words, it is said. And next comes the lover, and in relation to God the true believer. Pereat the commentators!

— Kierkegaard

From Diogenes of Sinope

2011-02-20T20:09:00.000+11:00

http://www.naturalthinker.net/trl/texts/DiogenesofSinope/index.htm

This contains almost the entire selection of anecdotes about Diogenes of Sinope, attributed to him by Diogenes Laërtias.

The categories are:
- On begging
- Where are the real men?
- Diogenes' Virtue Thought Excessive by Others
- Conqueror of Men
- Thou Art Dust
- The Reversal of Values
- Life and Death the Same
- Live Simply
- Stop Being a Hypocrite
- Vanity of the Virtuous
- On the Complacency of the Old
- Sucking-up, aka Sycophancy and Flattery
- Chastising Effeminacy
- Mocking Gods, Beliefs, Rituals, and Cherished Values
- Idiot Philosophers
- Diogenes' life as a slave
- Diogenes' writings

Diogenes was successful in promoting his views, because people thought he was a comical madman, a simpleton-cum-jester. Plato called him "Socrates gone mad". He was laughed at, because people thought a philosopher must have dignity and social respect, and live with pomp, respect and class. They couldn't see that this was a dire irony on the entire notion of what a philosopher was.

Thus, the contrast between how Diogenes actually lived, and the ridiculously decadent norms of Ancient Athens society, was extreme. The contrast took on an absurd character, and was indeed comical. His contemporaries couldn't seriously believe that one who lived in a truly virtuous, honest way, would be so plain and gauche.

It is always comical when animals try to modify their animality by disguising it, namely, shitting in porcelain vases with flowery decals, gorging themselves on expensively produced food prepared in complex ways and served on exquisitely designed platters, fucking in a high-class, modish chamber on soft mattresses, pillows and cushions, and snarling at each other in complicated language; but twice as comical is the effect when they are contrasted with another animal who lives as a very simple animal without pretences or affectations, and who also speaks the truth. It's extremely comical. The former have all the semblance of nobility and of being advanced organism - but none of the substance - while the simple, garish animal is utterly transformed by his intelligence, simplicity, and truthfulness.

This, plus his resilience and moral strength, accounts for Diogenes' ability to "force" his views on everyone like an ubiquitous chatterbox, without being killed.

— Kelly Jones

Authority

2011-02-10T21:19:00.002+11:00

"Authority" does not mean to be a king or to be an emperor or general, to have the power of arms, to be a bishop, or to be a policeman,* but it means by a firm and conscious resolution to be willing to sacrifice everything, one's very life, for his cause; it means to articulate a cause in such a way that a person is at one with himself, needing nothing and fearing nothing. This infinite recklessness** is authority. True authority is present when the truth is the cause. The reason the Pharisees spoke without authority, although they were indeed authorized teachers, was precisely that their talk, like their lives, was in the power of seventeen finite concerns.

*In margin: This is the conception of immanental authority, not the paradoxical conception of authority.

**In margin: Those with authority, therefore, always address themselves to the conscience, not to understanding, intelligence, profundity — to the human being, not to the professor.

— Kierkegaard

When Asceticism is Not

2011-02-09T23:01:00.002+11:00

The Displacement of the Whole of Christianity

Christianity was degraded into becoming a state religion. At the same time Christianity thereby became a doctrine — and asceticism arose. Asceticism is situationless^* renunciation. When Christianity battled and suffered persecution, asceticism in this sense was not needed.

^*In margin: N.B. And again the consequence of this was meritoriousness, super-meritoriousness, also, that there were extraordinary Christians and ordinary Christians.

The Public / Private Conundrum

2011-02-03T19:23:00.001+11:00

I have recently been accused on crossing the boundaries of the private/public, by publishing private emails without permission. In the final analysis, the accusation is based on the indignation they feel that one individual relies on their own thought and judgment, rather than another person's.

But thinking about the private/public concept is also stimulating and relevant.

The animal's interpretation of private/public has this meaning:

Private: what I really prefer.
Public: what I'd have others believe I prefer.

That is, the animal's concept is hypocrisy and falseness.

The spiritual man's interpretation of private/public has this meaning:

Private: what I suffer in my relationship to truth, willingly, that I do not tell others about, because it is mine to bear alone, and confiding in others is a refusal to bear it at all;
Public: what I let others know about for their benefit.

The animal believes there really is such a division, to protect his ego. It divides his own mind into compartments of honesty and falseness (he keeps his honesty hidden, and therefore makes everything to himself false). He has no real faith in anything, because when he speaks, he lies. That means he must also doubt his own inner thoughts, because he hears them in the same way that he hears his own speech.

The spiritual man creates a division between what he demands of himself, and what he requires of others. That division is the private/public concept. He sets a lower standard for others, but he will still not lower it as they would want him to. Thus, the standard is essentially unified, because his standard, and the lower standard he sets for others out of mercy for them, are both part of the same continuum. This means the spiritual man's concept of private/public is not divisive at all: it is all of one nature. He doesn't compartmentalise his mind.

Yes, I am disappointed in those who have attacked me for disrespecting their concept of private/public, because I thought some should have known better. But it is part of my spiritual trial, so I burden myself with it and hope to learn to have that apostolic division from the animal realm - to learn that I cannot have communion with any other being.

Kelly Jones

Kierkegaard's thoughts on the Apostle

2011-01-23T21:27:00.000+11:00

Extract 1:

A frivolous, vain individual always has an extraordinary conception of an apostle's high honor — i.e., the good fortune, the glory of being an apostle; a humble, profound individual always has an extraordinary conception of an apostle's sufferings.

Extract 2:

An Illusion

The supposed humility and modesty

in admitting that one does not call

himself an apostle.

Here again is a confusion which appears with the help of "Christendom", which again has turned all Christian concepts topsy-turvy — that is, has prevented them from being what they were originally: turned around.

One is said to be humble and modest if he says: I do not call myself an apostle. Consequently to call oneself an apostle is pride, conceit. That this can be pride and conceit I do not deny; I desire only to illuminate the relationship a little better.

When one speaks this way, the presupposition is that to be an apostle is a distinction; the humility and modesty lie in not claiming distinction. Fine. But like everything Christian, to be an apostle is not a straightforward distinction but a distinction turned around. Here comes a little N.B. In relationship to all direct distinction or distinguishing, the matter is very simple; if it is true that I make no claims, this is being modest, for a direct distinction is without secondary qualifications a direct earthly benefit. But to be an apostle is sheer earthly suffering. Well, if an apostle could be permitted to live again after his teaching had won out, then it could perhaps be an earthly benefit to be an apostle. But while he was living, calling himself an apostle did not help him on the way to honor, respect, or earthly advantage. Precisely this, that he called himself an apostle, was the signal for his having to suffer more than the other adherents, suffer until death.

This is what it means to be an apostle — something quite different from that later conception, which with the help of an illusion takes the apostle in vain.^*

^*In margin:

And it must be remembered that in a certain sense there is nothing we are all more equally close to than to being an apostle, simply because here there is no question of the esthetic difference of being a genius, of having talent, etc. Certainly every human being has the right to order his life just as an apostle with regard to poverty, suffering for the truth, etc., except that he does not have the right to appeal to divine authority. But he must not feel embarrassed about the first [being like an apostle], least of all out of modesty; that is, if there is to be any question about true modesty, it must be to confess that one is too weak and sensuous, therefore to bring accusation against oneself; it must not be as when I am too modest to ask to become an ambassador, a demigod artist, knight of all the European orders, etc.

But if this is the case, then to ask to be regarded as modest because one does not call himself an apostle becomes questionable, for this can also be worldly ingenuity and effeminacy.

For the confusing word "apostle" (which has subsequently become secularized and identified with the other distinctions of the world) let us substitute a whole lifetime of being laughed at, mocked, persecuted, poor, jailed, and slain. If someone now says: I am not so immodest as to demand to become "His Excellency," etc. — well, this is quite direct. But let someone say: I am not so immodest as to demand to become poor, impoverished, outcast in the world, laughed at, slain — well, this is not quite as direct; for in each generation it is impossible to find ten peersons who have courage for this. Consequently it can also be worldly ingenuity and effeminacy which hold one back but also want the advantage of being regarded as humble. This is questionable.

O, if what Christianity is were only kept clearly in mind! That it is not a doctrine but an existence [Existents], that what is needed is not professors but witnesses [Vidner] — then we would be free of all this self-important scholarliness [Videnskabelighed], these show-offs who are scholars — something Christianity now needs. No, if Christ did not need scholars but was satisfied with fishermen, what is needed now is more fishermen. Precisely because Christ was present, the danger would not have been so great if Christianity had fallen into the hands of scholars.

The error is not the studying, but the error is that the accent continually falls on the wrong place — on penetrating and presenting — thus to do something about it becomes ridiculous, a triviality. A simple man, however, has no distractions. Such a man straightway fastens his gaze upon his life, whether it has any meaning or is completely meaningless. But this simplification with regard to drawing up the account is of utmost importance; for then the accent falls on the right place, on existence [Existentsen].

Extract 3:

"The Apostle"

The condition sine qua non for all enjoyment of life is a certain evenness; the person with a most wretched lot also can gain a certain enjoyment if he only has this daily evenness.

But no other situation in life, not one, makes it so impossible to enjoy life as being an apostle. This horrifying life of being tossed in a blanket. At one moment to be brought into direst need, perhaps ravenously hungry, then to be willing — if it be God's will — to die of hunger — and then get a reprimand: You of little faith! Or, in order not to suffer ravenous hunger, to be quite willing to work for his livelihood — and then, just as he is beginning at it, a miracle happens, and he gets a reproof: You of little faith! O, it is a dreadful misery, a kind of conscious madness in all his blessedness, for it is like madness.

Ah, however spoiled and frivolous I am, so much will surely be granted me that I at least have dared venture far enough to be honest toward the extraordinary and not to take him in vain, at least to have a tolerably true idea of how infinitely the extraordinary has suffered.

Extract 4:

Serpens, nisi serpentum comederit, non fit Draco.

Further: a rat is trained to bite rats by eating a rat out of hunger.

The reverse: only a person who is bitten by men becomes an apostle; this belongs in order to qualify his passion; an apostle in direct understanding with men is an impossibility.

"Anxiety"

2011-01-21T20:24:00.000+11:00

is actually nothing but impatience.

— Kierkegaard (1850)

The psychology of sexual desire

2011-01-05T16:26:00.000+11:00

is all about social status. The pair-bond creates a psychological realm that is a secret sanctuary known only to the self and the lover. This deep emotional bond powerfully drives away the encroaching menace of the low social status of: being a frail, single self, solitarily pitted against "all the others".

The lover-bond is a "love-cocoon", absorbing, swallowing and embracing the two lovers against "all the others". But there is an interesting dynamic here.

Namely, those two are a symbol of "all the rest".

Once a small, vulnerable, single self becomes the fortified solace of the couple, once one is in a definite sexual/emotional coupledom, once one becomes a group-entity, then the power of the many has suddenly been established and endorsed. No longer are "all the rest" a feared power. Instead, they are an extension of one's new doubled-self.

That is, a coupledom is many, rather than a unit of two individuals. The couple is the basic unit of the masses.

This is why so many people couple up: it is social power, personal safety, and an emotional buffer against the tenuous frailty of being an infinite, and therefore non-existent, self.

— Kelly Jones

Something about the Forgiveness of Sins

2011-01-01T21:58:00.000+11:00

To believe the forgiveness of one's sins is the decisive crisis whereby a human being becomes spirit; he who does not believe this is not spirit. Maturity of the spirit means that spontaneity is completely lost, that a person is not only capable of nothing by himself but is capable only of injury to himself. But how many in truth come in a wholly personal way to understand of themselves that one is brought to this extremity. (Here lies the absurd, offense, the paradox, forgiveness of sins.)

Most men never become spirit, never experience becoming spirit. The stages — child, youth, adult, oldster — they pass through these with no credit to themselves; it is none of their doing, for it is a vegetative or vegetative-animal process. But they never experience becoming spirit.

The forgiveness of sins is not a matter of particulars — as if on the whole one were good (this is childish, for the child always begs forgiveness for some particular thing which it did yesterday and forgets today, etc.; it could never occur to a child, in fact, the child could not even get into its head, that it is actually evil); no, it is just the opposite — it pertains not so much to particulars as to the totality; it pertains to one's whole self, which is sinful and corrupts everything as soon as it comes in slightest contact with it.

Anyone who in truth has experienced and experiences what it is to believe the forgiveness of one's sins has indeed become another person. Everything is forgotten — but still it is not with him as with the child who, after having received pardon, becomes essentially the same child again. No, he has become an eternity older, for he has now become spirit. All spontaneity and its selfishness, its selfish attachment to the world and to himself, have been lost. Now he is, humanly speaking, old, very old, but eternally he is young.

The restless arrow

2011-01-01T20:44:00.000+11:00

Just as the expert archer's arrow leaves the bowstring and has no rest before it reaches the target, so the human being is created by God with God as his aim and cannot find rest before he finds rest in God.

Kierkegaard

From Nietzsche

2010-12-14T22:05:00.000+11:00

Imagine the most extreme example, a person who did not possess the power of forgetting at all, who would be condemned to see everywhere a coming into being. Such a person no longer believes in his own being, no longer believes in himself, sees everything in moving points flowing out of each other, and loses himself in this stream of becoming.

As the hundreds of different languages correspond to the same typically permanent needs of people, so that someone who understood these needs could learn nothing new from all the languages, so the superhistorical thinker illuminates for himself all the histories of people and of individuals from within, guessing like a clairvoyant the original sense of the different hieroglyphics and gradually even growing tired of avoiding the constantly new streams of written signals streaming forth. For, in the endless excess of what is happening, how is he not finally to reach saturation, supersaturation, and, yes, even revulsion, so that the most daring ones are perhaps finally ready, with Giacomo Leopardi, to say to their heart

Nothing lives which would be worthy
of your striving, and the earth deserves not a sigh.
Pain and boredom is our being and the world is excrement,
--nothing else.
Calm yourself.

As long as the soul of historical writing lies in the great driving impulses which a powerful man derives from it, as long as the past must be written about as worthy of imitation, as capable of being imitated, with the possibility of a second occurrence, history is definitely in danger of becoming something altered, reinterpreted into something more beautiful, and thus coming close to free poeticizing.

If we want to transfer into the area of culture the customs of popular agreement and the popular majority and, as it were, to require the artist to stand in his own defense before the forum of the artistically inert types, then we can take an oath in advance that he will be condemned, not in spite of but just because his judges have solemnly proclaimed the canon of monumental culture...

So they are knowledgeable about culture because they generally like to get rid of culture. They behave as if they were doctors, while basically they are only concerned with mixing poisons. Thus, they develop their languages and their taste, in order to explain in their discriminating way why they so persistently disapprove of all offerings of more nourishing cultural food. For they do not want greatness to arise. Their method is to say: "See greatness is already there!"

Only the man whose breast is oppressed by a present need and who wants to cast off his load at any price has a need for critical history, that is, history which sits in judgment and passes judgment. From the thoughtless transplanting of plants stem many ills: the critical man without need, the antiquarian without reverence, and the student of greatness without the ability for greatness are the sort who are receptive to weeds estranged from their natural mother earth and therefore degenerate growths.

The scholarly habit lives on without it and orbits in an egotistical and self-satisfied manner around its own centre. Then we get a glimpse of the wretched drama of a blind mania for collecting, a restless compiling together of everything that ever existed. The man envelops himself in a mouldy smell. With the antiquarian style, he manages to corrupt a significant talent, a noble need, into an insatiable new lust, a desire for everything really old. Often he sinks so deep that he is finally satisfied with that nourishment and takes pleasure in gobbling up for himself the dust of biographical quisquilien [rubbish].

For what means does nature still have at its disposal to deal with the super-abundance forcing itself outward? Only one means, to take it as lightly as possible in order to shove it aside again quickly and dispose of it. From that arises a habit of not taking real things seriously any more. From that arises the "weak personality," as a result of which reality and existence make only an insignificant impression. Finally people become constantly more venial and more comfortable and widen the disturbing gulf between content and form until they are insensitive to the barbarism, so long as the memory is always newly stimulated, so long as constantly new things worthy of knowledge flow by, which can be neatly packaged in the compartments of memory.

While never before has there been such sonorous talk of the "free personality," we never once see personalities, to say nothing of free people, but only anxiously disguised universal people.

No one is allowed to venture on fulfilling the law of philosophy on his own. No one lives philosophically, with that simple manly truth, which acted forcefully on a man in ancient times, wherever he was, and which thus drove him to behave as Stoic if he had once promised to be true to the Stoa. All modern philosophy is political and police-like, restricted to the appearance of learning through the ruling powers, churches, academies, customs, and human cowardice. It sticks around with sighs of "If only" or with the knowledge "There was once." Philosophy is wrong to be at the heart of historical education, if it wants to be more than an inner repressed knowledge without effect.

If the personalities are, first of all, as has been described, inflated to an eternal loss of subjectivity or, as people say, to objectivity, then nothing more can work on them. Let something good and right come about, in action, poetry, or music. Immediately the person emptied out by his education looks out over the world and asks about the history of the author. If this author has already created a number of things, immediately the critic must allow himself to point out the earlier and the presumed future progress of the author's development; right away he will bring in others for comparative purposes, he will dissect and rip apart the choice of the author's material and his treatment, and will, in his wisdom, fit the work together again anew, giving him advice and setting him right about everything. Let the most astonishing thing occur; the crowd of historical neutrals is always in place ready to assess the author from a great distance. Momentarily the echo resounds, but always as "Criticism." A short time before, however, the critic did not permit himself to dream that such an event was possible.

The work never achieves an influence, but only more "Criticism," and the criticism itself, in its turn, has no influence, but leads only to further criticism. In this business people have agreed to consider a lot of critics as an influence and a few critics or none as a failure. Basically, however, everything remains as in the past, even with this "influence." True, people chat for a while about something new, and then about something else new, and in between do what they always do. The historical education of our critics no longer permits an influence on our real understanding, namely, an influence on life and action. On the blackest writing they impress immediately their blotting paper, to the most delightful drawing they apply their thick brush strokes, which are to be considered corrections. And then everything is over once again. However, their critical pens never cease flying, for they have lost power over them and are led by them rather than leading them. In this excess of their critical ejaculations, in the lack of control over themselves, in what the Romans call impotentia [impotence], the weakness of the modern personality reveals itself.

Few people serve truthfulness, because only a few have the purity of will to be just. Moreover, even of these, the fewest have the strength to be able to be just.

There are many trivial truths; there are problems that never require effort, let alone any self-sacrifice, in order for one to judge them correctly. In this field of the trivial and the safe, a person indeed succeeds in becoming a cold demon of knowledge nonetheless. When, especially in favourable times, whole cohorts of learned people and researchers are turned into such demons, it always remains unfortunately possible that the time in question suffers from a lack of strong and great righteousness, in short, of the most noble kernel of the so-called drive to the truth.

As judges you must stand higher than what is being assessed, whereas, you have only come later. The guests who come last to the table should in all fairness receive the last places. And you wish to have the first places? Then at least do something of the highest and best order. Perhaps people will then really make a place for you, even if you come at the end.

An eminently learned man and a great numskull--those go together very easily under a single hat.

Anyone who has not experienced life on a greater and higher level than everyone else will not know how to interpret the greatness and loftiness of the past. The utterance of the past is always an oracular pronouncement. You will understand it only as builders of the future and as people who know about the present. People now explain the extraordinarily deep and far-reaching effect of Delphi by the particular fact that the Delphic priests had precise knowledge about the past. It is appropriate now to understand that only the man who builds the future has a right to judge the past. In order to look ahead, set yourselves an important goal, and at the same time control that voluptuous analytical drive with which you now lay waste the present and render almost impossible all tranquility, all peaceful growth and maturing. Draw around yourself the fence of a large and extensive hope, an optimistic striving. Create in yourselves a picture to which the future is to correspond, and forget the myth that you are epigones. You have enough to plan and to invent when you imagine that future life for yourselves. But in considering history do not ask that she show you the "How?" and the "With what?" If, however, you live your life in the history of great men, then you will learn from history the highest command: to become mature and to flee away from that paralyzing and prohibiting upbringing of the age, which sees advantages for itself in not allowing you to become mature, in order to rule and exploit you, the immature. And when you ask after biographies, then do not ask for those with the refrain "Mr. Soandso and His Age" but for those whose title page must read "A Fighter Against His Age." Fill your souls with Plutarch, and dare to believe in yourselves when you have faith in his heroes. With a hundred people raised in such an unmodern way, that is, people who have become mature and familiar with the heroic, one could permanently silence the entire noisy pseudo-education of this age.

They can only cackle more than before, because they lay eggs more often. Naturally, however, the eggs have become constantly smaller (although the books have become constantly thicker). As the final natural result, things resign themselves to the commonly loved "Popularizing" of science (in addition to the "Feminization" and "Infantization"), that is, the notorious tailoring of the scientific coat to the body of the "motley public"

The time will come in which people wisely refrain from all constructions of the world process or even of human history, a time in which people in general no longer consider the masses but once again think about individuals who construct a sort of bridge over the chaotic storm of becoming. These people do not set out some sort of process, but live timelessly and contemporaneously, thanks to history which permits such a combination. They live like the republic of geniuses, about which Schopenhauer once explained that one giant shouts out to another across the barren intervals of time, and undisturbed by the wanton and noisy midgets who creep around them, the giants continue their lofty spiritual conversation. The task of history is to be a mediator between them and thus to provide an opportunity and the energies for the development of greatness. No, the goal of humanity cannot finally be anywhere but in its greatest examples.

To me, the masses seem to be worth a glance in only in three respects: first as blurred copies of great men, presented on bad paper with worn out printing plates, then as the resistance against the great men, and finally as working implements of the great. For the rest, let the devil and statistics carry them off! How might statistics demonstrate that there could be laws in history? Laws? Yes, statistics prove how coarse and disgustingly uniform the masses are. Are we to call the effects of the powerful forces of stupidity, mimicry, love, and hunger laws?

Yes, people know what a certain predominance of history is capable of; people know it only too well: to uproot the strongest instincts of youth, fire, defiance, forgetting of the self, to dampen down the heat of their sense of right and wrong, to hold back or repress the desire to mature slowly with the contrary desire to be finished quickly, to be useful and productive, to infect the honesty and boldness of the feelings with doubts. Indeed, history is itself capable of deceiving the young about their most beautiful privilege, about their power to cultivate in themselves with complete conviction a great idea and to allow an even greater idea to grow forth out of it. A certain excess of history is capable of all this. We have seen it. And this is the reason: through its incessant shifting of the horizons of significance, through the elimination of a surrounding atmosphere, it no longer allows a person to perceive and to act unhistorically. He then draws himself from the infinity of his horizon back into himself, into the smallest egotistical region and there must wither away and dry up.

The German education of the young, however, begins directly from this false and barren idea of culture. Its end goal, imagined in all purity and loftiness, is not at all the freely educated man, but the scholar, the scientific person, indeed, the scientific person who is useful as early as possible, the person who sets himself apart from life in order to recognize it clearly. The product of this education, considered in a correct empirically general way, is the historically and aesthetically educated Philistine, the precocious and freshly wise chatterer about state, church, and art, the sensorium for thousands of sensations, the inexhaustible stomach which nevertheless does not know what an honest hunger and thirst are.

That monotonous orthodoxy would sound something like this: the young person has to begin with a knowledge of culture, not at first with a knowledge of life, and even less with life and experience themselves. Moreover, this knowledge about culture as historical knowledge is poured over or stirred into the youth; that is, his head is filled up with a monstrous number of ideas derived from extremely indirect knowledge of past times and peoples, not from the immediate contemplation of living. His desire to experience something for himself and to feel growing in him a coordinated and living system of his own experiences--such a desire is narcotized and, as it were, made drunk through the opulent deceptions about matters of fact, as if it were possible in a few years to sum up in oneself the highest and most remarkable experiences of all times, especially of the greatest ages. It is precisely this insane procedure which leads our young developing artists into the halls of culture and galleries instead of into the workshop of a master and, above all, into the extraordinary workshops of the extraordinary master craftswoman Nature.

This truthfulness may also occasionally seriously harm the idea of culture esteemed at the time; it even may be able to assist a totally decorative culture to collapse.

Friedrich Nietzsche (1886)
The Use and Abuse of History for Life

Communication

2010-12-03T23:25:00.000+11:00

At the beginning of the path, a student perceives mountains and rivers. As he proceeds, he realises that mountains and rivers are not mountains and rivers. At the end of the path, mountains and rivers are mountains and rivers.

Although sinking back into the world looks like returning to the first position again, it is not so. Everything has changed irrevocably. Everything one experiences is as it is: totally transformed by understanding.

Karma is the return of the first position, and the need to go through the renunciation. In the Hindu tradition is the saying, "Neti Neti". This is the negative conceptualisation of all concrete existence, reminding oneself not to grasp to finitude. Another saying is "Tat tvam asi", which again reminds oneself not to grasp to finitude, but to see all as sharing the same nature.

Communication is rife with difficulties, because speaking of the truth is always negative. The hearer is not yet even in the first position, so hears only fixed and concrete realities. They have that deep prejudice and lack of insight. It takes skill to take away from the listener in all the negating conceptual gifts. This seems like a paradox, but it is a simple process of finding words that tear away the concreteness of a grasping mind's conceptualisations and by slipping and sliding and merging ideas so as to convey less.

Unfortunately, in negating and destroying, there are many listeners who so bring their objectifying mental habits to bear, that they see only "destruction", "death", "nay-saying", and "bleakness" in the negating dialectic. It is truly difficult to break apart the concretising habits of such an attitude; it is the social animal that wants merging, power, illusion, enchantment, magic and mystery. It is possible that such a base, emotional psychology is not close enough to the realms of reason to deal with God in the dialectical, indirect way. Probably one has to give them baby food like poetry, strongly positive (i.e. nondialectical) ideals, and take the level of personality in order to draw them to first base where mountains are simply mountains and not reminders of their childhood. Truly, one is speaking to little children with these.

It is wrong to be speaking directly and positively, quite wrong, because this is existentially revoking the meaning of one's communication. But if the listener is of low scope, then it is impossible not to work on a level they can step towards more easily.

One must always remember to be, at first call, in the relationship individually and authentically, to the truth. Only to that ground is one's message meaningful and right-oriented. One cannot speak as anyone but as that relationship of self to the Infinite. One cannot speak as a human finitude related to the crowd, or to another human finitude. That misplaces the truth of the message. One must always take one's stance in the meaning, taking away at every breath any tendencies or movements to reinforce or concretise, or even the movement of negating that would profer itself as substantial.

It truly takes mindfulness and consistency in faith to communicate. As another has said, only a wise person can speak the truth.

Kelly Jones

Spiritual friendship

2010-11-24T18:44:00.000+11:00

What spiritual friendship is not: a feeling of comfort, safety and warmth in companionship.

Spiritual friendship does not put a communion of minds above the individual's own private relationship to truth. By truth, I don't just mean truthfulness, but truth itself. The concept of truth is "how something is in an absolute sense", and is the standard tool for understanding Reality.

Spirituality is about understanding Reality. Therefore, spiritual friendship must be wholly focussed on the individual's own relationship to truth.

Feeling welcomed, happy, safe, loved, respected, and admired indicates loss of spirit in oneself - and also in whoever instigates those feelings in you. Why is this the case? I'll explain it briefly.

Understanding Reality reveals the true nature of oneself: that all is empty of intrinsic reality. Ultimately, Reality has no form of its own. It cannot be confined in dualistic forms, or be exclusive and finite, since all finite things share the same relative, interdependent nature (dreams are only dreams relative to waking life, and are real in their existence of being dreams).

Thus, all the forms and finite entities like selves, objects, possessions, loved or hated people, emotions, dreams, wishes and ideas, are merely wisps of existence: interactive, tangling, intercoursing strands in the ever-unfolding oneness of Reality. None of them are truly separate, nor exist independently in a solid concrete way.

So, the feelings of warmth, comfort, safety, delight, or pride that arise in relationships, automatically guarantees a lack of enlightenment. These feelings indicate the basic, underlying delusion of concrete self-existence. The need for a companion to reaffirm and concretise one's existence, one's values, one's opinions and world-view, are all branches from the one root of the delusion of self-existence.

Spiritual friendship must spring from an individual relationship to truth, and only the absolutely perfectly wise person feels no pain from spiritual friendship.

So here are some warnings:

If you trust another person, it is almost certainly a guarantee that neither of you are wise.

If you have warm feelings of respect for them, again, wisdom is lost.

If you have an associate or colleague who smiles at you, laughs, enjoys your company, likes to hold passionate conversations with you, then you ought to warn them that they've lost their soul. If they disagree with you, then keep away from them.

If you cannot find a good soul who refuses to lie to you, if you cannot find someone who tells the truth without adornment, if you cannot find someone who is plain-speaking and troubles only to deepen their roots in emptiness, if you cannot find someone who is without affectation, pride, compassion, or affection, then....

Wander alone like a rhinoceros.

— Kelly Jones

Training soul into the world

2010-06-09T21:02:00.001+10:00

A sponging cat from the neighbour's has been visiting me a lot recently, after I gave it a bowl of milk and a pat. I don't keep my door closed. But like a trained robot, it instinctively wants to rub its body over my legs and make loud purring noises. These sorts of behaviours have obviously pleased humans for thousands of years, evidently for the cat's massaging techniques and "I'm a happy contented creature" sounds. So humans have allowed cats to sponge off them, in exchange for the ego-rubbing services. The cat in response cannot help itself from behaving like that, in the hope for food.

I don't allow it to rub against me, or sit on me. I don't give it food. It doesn't pur so much now, and meows a bit less. Its behaviour is simpler. It is being trained not to be an ego-masseuse. I can see humanity in this cat, millions of cat-generations of obsequiousness to sadistic humans. The cat has no conscience or soul, but I do.

— Kelly Jones

The Woman's World: A Praise-ful Satire

2010-06-04T21:50:00.000+10:00

One word: Vague.

Everything is kept deliberately vague and noncommital. That's how the Woman's World functions. What do I mean by the Woman's World? I mean, the current culture that promises The New American Dream: whatever is possible, women must be permitted the reputation of already having achieved it. The sleight-of-hand required to convince everyone that this dream is good and virtuous, is the Cult of Mediocrity. Don't smile at the capitalisation: Vague is also capitalised. (It's super-vagueness.)

Let me explain. The way the masses are convinced that feminism has finally achieved its stated goal of equality for the sexes, with the triumphant successes of leading businesswomen, stateswomen, female bankers, female Nobel prize winners, female literati, etc., is through consumerism. That is, if you desire it, you may have it. This is the American Dream per se: the free-market as the essence of personal freedom. Thus, it is extremely easy to move every achievement worth noting, into the realm of dreams and desires. To dream is good. To dream is virtuous. To hope is praiseworthy. To aim and aspire is awe-inspiring and motivating.

But to do anything is tedious and boring, requiring effort and time and repetition, and bringing failure and disappointment. To actually have to slog through the long, arduous, private, long, unnoticed, dirty, painful, long, repetitive, uncertain, unfinished, long process of gradual alteration, of learning and self-correction, is totally devoid of any sense of finality and achievement. More often than not, the utter relativity of one's states of progress become very obvious, so that if one ever does seem to be achieving, even relative to one's past, it all crumbles into nothingness – because where is the ultimate standard? If one looks to what has been already achieved and standardised by men, the realisation by women is that they have come nowhere near the goal. And thus, instead of this effort, we get dreams and a rejection of standards and absolutes. We get a rejection of individuals competing against other individuals. Instead, everyone is a winner.

Consumerism teaches instant gratification, sensationalism, sensory overload, superlatives, false ultimates (The Ultimate in Sportwear), false absolutes (Absolutely the fastest car ever produced), fast-talking and cunning deceit. Everything is presented in such a way as to avoid consciousness. Television presenters are smooth with their spiels, gabbing incessantly to avoid contrasts and sharp edges. It is precisely the method used by crocodile handlers, who maintain a harmonious vocal patter while tapping the crocodile repeatedly with a long stick, to mesmerise the crocodile with musical patterns into an expectant and passive trance-state. Consumerism hypnotises, creating the same glazed-eyed passivity. Everyone is a winner. Everyone deserves what they need. Everyone is equal. No one should be lacking. No one should be any different to anyone else. Everyone should be treated equally. Everyone should be treated the same. Everyone should be smiled at in exactly the same, bland, personality-free way. No one can stand out. No one should be trusted who is different. No one is any better than anyone else. But then, no one can be special. And, oh dear, we all want to be special!

The cult of mediocrity is born. And how popular it is - of course it is. Yet, within the apparent safety and happiness of immediate gratification, there is also a deep-seated, intrinsic anxiety.

Women suffer more from anxiety and nervous tension than do men. Why? Because of their 'egalitarian', personality-less ideal. Precisely because they believe they are (read: should be) just as good as anyone else, no different in the slightest, women have no personal groundedness. They judge themselves relative to others......ad infinitum. They lack individuality, meaning: soul, centredness, an inward thinking-focussed life. To hide this personal vacuum, the Woman's World dictum is: march on, shop, stimulate your desires - enter the eternal and endless chase for MORE! ---- and you hope you will never wake up to hear the mind-numbing roar of the vacuum. Oh, keep it vague, don't worry about it. It'll pass. Stifle it.

Existentially, this Woman's World has actually vagarised the individual's existence, at the same time as making it the centre of attention. Vague: the individual must be clouded over, so that it is nothing but a blurry fog of uncertainty. Welcome to Post-modernism: the blather of nothingness enshrouded in a sophisticated verbiage of fog.

— Kelly Jones

Great Purpose

2010-05-14T21:36:00.002+10:00

He who commits himself to the Way must be equipped with three essentials. A great root of faith, a great ball of doubt, and a great tenacity of purpose. Lacking any one of them, he is like a tripod with only two legs.

By "great root of faith" is meant the firm conviction that the practice of reason alone can carry one to the perfection of Ultimate Enlightenment. With the practice of reason great doubts about life and death will crystallize. Yet even though you become a great ball of doubt, you will be unable to break it apart unless you constantly work on it with a great burning tenacity of purpose.

The practice of the Way is like making fire by friction. The essential thing as you rub wood against stone is to apply continuous all-out effort. If you stop when you see the first trace of smoke, you will never get even a flicker of fire, even though you may rub away for a thousand years.

Don't think the commitments and pressing duties of normal life leave you no time to go about forming a ball of doubt. If a man, while pushing his way through a busy marketplace, drops some bank notes onto the ground, will he just leave them there and forget about them, just because he is in a crowded place? Of course not. He would be down there frantically pushing and shoving with tears in his eyes trying to find them. Yet what is a bit of money compared with Great Enlightenment?

The worldly man needs a great purpose to motivate him - if he wants to achieve anything much. Likewise does the spiritual man require Great Purpose to provide the force necessary to relinquish his ego.

— Kevin Solway

Keys

2010-04-30T18:21:00.000+10:00

• Thinking is invisible, but the thought-rich life makes materiality invisible by contrast. The thinker experiences thought as the most solid reality.

• Simplicity strengthens the mind through stripping away external paraphernalia.

• Turning inward strengthens the soul, but one must reinforce this by abandoning and ignoring society and its bonds. Never smile, never look into another's face with desire.

• Evening and night-time are my favourite times: there is no glare and noise fades. Use a blindfold and earplugs through the day if it helps. Camp in forests regularly, lying under the stars, wakefully and thoughtfully reviewing progress and marking out areas for improvement.

• Other people are useless in regards to your own soul. Soul is one's own concern, and soulcare is purely individualistic. So ignore others. Never seek approval in others. Also, it is worthless to worry over your reputation: e.g. being marked out by others as troubled or nasty. Clearly, they aren't interested in wisdom, and they will never be remembered by eternity. Their choice to be insane and arrogant is their own responsibility, not yours. Abandon them.

• Your character is your own responsibility. Do not be reckless, impulsive, lazy, apathetic, fatalistic, and undisciplined. You get what you want.

• Do not use samadhi for worldly goals, because birth-and-death will inevitably result. If you use mental brightness and energy to fulfil materialistic plans to solidify the ego, you will be overly active, and soon become fatigued - thus, the buoyant active life will die, and the depressed, passive, cynical life will be born. Only use samadhi for Godliness, and escape rebirth.

• Command yourself and obey your commands. Do not listen to ignoble thoughts.

Individuality

2010-04-09T21:40:00.000+10:00

.....it is not possible to harvest immediately what one has sown. I will remember that philosopher's method of having his disciples keep silent for three years; then I dare say it will come. Just as one does not begin a feast at sunrise but at sundown, just so in the spiritual world one must work forward for some time before the sun really shines for us and rises in all its glory; for although it is true as it says that God lets his sun shine upon the good and the evil and lets the rain fall on the just and the unjust, it is not so in the spiritual world.

So let the die be cast — I am crossing the Rubicon! No doubt this road takes me into battle, but I will not renounce it. I will not lament the past — why lament? I will work energetically and not waste time in regrets, like the person stuck in a bog and first calculating how far he has sunk without recognizing that during the time he spends on that he is sinking still deeper. I will hurry along the path I have found and shout to everyone I meet: Do not look back as Lot's wife did, but remember that we are struggling up a hill.

— Kierkegaard, 1835

The door-to-door evangelist

2010-03-29T11:41:00.001+11:00

Without doubt, the motivation for the door-to-door evangelist is, paradoxically, a deep fear of men. It is this that drives the lonely evangelist to face death in one-on-one verbal battling. He (or she) is driven by the egotistical fear of death and decomposition, seeing only a collision with the encroaching outer environment. God is for them an invisible abstract power against the miscellany of real things to be found in everyday life.

For this reason, the evangelist will be unable to listen: they can only hear what can be used to repeat the mantras that help support their system of social security. They will pretend to listen only so as to manipulate their audience emotionally into befriending them (the sign of which is, repeating their views, taking their brochures, etc.)

Don't be frustrated with their irrationality and refusal to listen. They only want someone to love them; that is what God means to them. Above all, what they regard as Satanic is the view of God not loving them as they are, a God that makes everything difficult, a God that inspires conflict, a God that slays men. In other words: God is to them: their own comfort and wellbeing. Everything they say will come from this perspective.

One of the best ways to counter these frightened mice is to show them that Nature has always been about conflict and war and causality, but to do so with images of the ocean, of weather-storms, of galaxies colliding.

Kelly Jones

Worldly wisdom

2010-03-25T19:25:00.000+11:00

With worldly wisdom one says, things will get better soon. One's consolation is shrinking from going out into the current — one tries to wade as long as possible. As long as this is not definitely decided, there always remains a doubt about the importance of actuality in one's whole train of thought.

So worldly wisdom is passing by on actuality: its actuality is the actuality of worldly wisdom, where no change is willed, so no change is perceived. One refuses to see how time passes one by. Thus, there is no change to see. This is the way most people live, although they fill their lives with spectacle and entertainment to hide the reality of their actual stagnancy.

But there is danger also in positioning oneself in relation to the actuality of "most people", for that too is shrinking from going out into the current, into the wholeness of "myself".

— Kelly Jones, developed from Kierkegaard (1843).

10 Bulls, by Kakuan

2010-03-20T22:59:00.000+11:00

1. The Search for the Bull

The bull has been lost. What need is there to search? Only because of separation from my true nature, I fail to find him. In the confusion of the sense I lose even his tracks. Far from home, I see many crossroads, but which way is the right one I know not. Greed and fear, good and bad, entangle me.

In the pasture of this world, I endlessly push aside the tall grasses in search of the bull.
Following unnamed rivers, lost upon the interpenetrating paths of distant mountains,
My strength failing and my vitality exhausted, I cannot find the bull.
I only hear the locusts chirring through the forest at night.

2. Discovering the Footprints

Understanding the teaching, I see the footprints of the bull. Then I learn that, just as many utensils are made from one metal, so too are myriad entities made of the fabric of self. Unless I discriminate, how will I perceive the true from the untrue? Not yet having entered the gate, nevertheless I have discerned the path.

Along the riverbank under the trees, I discover footprints!
Even under the fragrant grasses I see his prints.
Deep in remote mountains they are found.
These traces no more can be hidden than one's nose, looking heavenward.

3. Perceiving the Bull

When one hears the voice, one can sense its source. As soon as the six senses merge, the gate is entered. Wherever one enters one sees the head of the bull! This unity is like salt in water, like colour in dyestuff. The slightest thing is not apart from self.

I hear the song of the nightingale.
The sun is warm, the wind is mild, willows are green along the shore,
Here no bull can hide!
What artist can draw that massive head, those majestic horns?

4. Catching the Bull

He dwelt in the forest a long time, but I caught him today! Infatuation for scenery interferes with his direction. Longing for sweeter grass, he wanders away. His mind still is stubborn and unbridled. If I wish him to submit, I must raise my whip.

I seize him with a terrific struggle.
His great will and power are inexhaustible.
He charges to the high plateau far above the cloud-mists,
Or in an impenetrable ravine he stands.

5. Taming the Bull

When one thought arises, another thought follows. When the first thought springs from enlightenment, all subsequent thoughts are true. Through delusion, one makes everything untrue. Delusion is not caused by objectivity; it is the result of subjectivity. Hold the nose-ring tight and do not allow even a doubt.

The whip and rope are necessary,
Else he might stray off down some dusty road.
Being well trained, he becomes naturally gentle.
Then, unfettered, he obeys his master.

6. Riding the Bull Home

This struggle is over; gain and loss are assimilated. I sing the song of the village woodsman, and play the tunes of the children. Astride the bull, I observe the clouds above. Onward I go, no matter who may wish to call me back.

Mounting the bull, slowly I return homeward.
The voice of my flute intones through the evening.
Measuring with hand-beats the pulsating harmony, I direct the endless rhythm.
Whoever hears this melody will join me.

7. The Bull Transcended

All is one law, not two. We only make the bull a temporary subject. It is as the relation of rabbit and trap, of fish and net. It is as gold and dross, or the moon emerging from a cloud. One path of clear light travels on throughout endless time.

Astride the bull, I reach home.
I am serene. The bull too can rest.
The dawn has come. In blissful repose,
Within my thatched dwelling I have abandoned the whip and rope.

8. Both Bull and Self Transcended

Mediocrity is gone. Mind is clear of limitations. I seek no state of enlightenment. Neither do I remain where no enlightenment exists. Since I linger in neither condition, eyes cannot see me. If hundreds of birds strew my path with flowers, such praise would be meaningless.

Whip, rope, person, and bull — all merge in No-thing.
This heaven is so vast no message can stain it.
How may a snowflake exist in a raging fire?
Here are the footprints of the patriarchs.

9. Reaching the Source

From the beginning, truth is clear. Poised in silence, I observe the forms of integration and disintegration. One who is not attached to 'form' need not be 'reformed'. The water is emerald, the mountain is indigo, and I see that which is creating and that which is destroying.

Too many steps have been taken returning to the root and the source.
Better to have been blind and deaf from the beginning!
Dwelling in one's true abode, unconcerned with that without —
The river flows tranquilly on and the flowers are red.

10. In the World

Inside my gate, a thousand sages do not know me. The beauty of my garden is invisible. Why should one search for the footprints of the patriarchs? I go to the market place with my wine bottle and return home with my staf. I visit the wineshop and the market, and everyone I look upon becomes enlightened.

Barefooted and naked of breast, I mingle with the people of the world.
My clothes are ragged and dust-laden and I am ever blissful.
I use no magic to extend my life;
Now, before me, the trees become alive.

Kakuan.

Great Waves Onami

2010-02-06T22:43:00.000+11:00

Great Waves

In the early days of the Meiji era there lived a well known wrestler called O-nami, Great Waves. O-nami was immensely strong and knew the art of wrestling. In his private bouts he defeated even his teacher, but in public he was so bashful that his own pupils threw him.

O-nami felt he should go to a Zen master for help. Hakuju, a wandering teacher, was stopping in a little temple nearby, so O-nami went to see him and told him of his trouble.

"Great Waves is your name," the teacher advised, "so stay in this temple tonight, Imagine that you are those billows. You are no longer a wrestler who is afraid. You are those huge waves sweeping everything before them, swallowing in all their path. Do this and you will be the greatest wrestler in the land."

The teacher retired. O-nami sat in meditation trying to imagine himself as waves. He thought of many different things. Then gradually he turned more and more to the feeling of the waves. As the night advanced the waves became larger and larger. They swept away the flowers in their vases. Even the Buddha in the shrine was inundated. Before dawn the temple was nothing but the ebb and flow of an immense sea.

In the morning the teacher found O-nami meditating, a faint smile on his face. He patted the wrestler's shoulder. "Now nothing can disturb you," he said. "You are those waves. You will sweep everything before you."

The same day O-nami entered the wrestling contests and won. After that, no one in Japan was able to defeat him.

To will one virtue — Results

2010-02-01T01:02:00.000+11:00

It is said that I am a slipshod writer. Well, that is a matter of opinion. I am fully convinced that there is not a Danish writer who pays as much attention to the insignificant word as I do. I write everything in my own hand twice, some parts three and four times, and in addition, something no one knows anything about, there is my meditating as I walk; before I write I have said everything aloud to myself many times — and this they call being a slipshod writer! And why? Because they have no conception of it at all, because to them an author is someone who at most spends a certain number of hours a day sitting in a room and writing and otherwise has nothing to do with his ideas. Therefore, that kind of an author needs time when he comes home to get into the spirit again — whereas I come home with the whole thing thought through and memorized, even in its stylistic form — when people read a few pages of my writing they are almost always amazed at my style — but a big book — well, how is that possible — ergo: I must be a slipshod writer. No, when one wills only one thing, wills one thing with every sacrifice, every effort — then it is possible.

In a way I can become nauseated by life, for I, who love but one thought — which a person can really be if he wills it — I constitute an epigram upon men, because their judgment of me, the fact that they really cannot understand my consistency, is tragic proof of the categories, the mediocrity, in which they live.

— Søren Kierkegaard, 1846

Taming the Bull

2010-01-30T09:29:00.002+11:00

When one thought arises, another follows. When the first thought springs from enlightenment, all subsequent thoughts are true. Through delusion, one makes everything untrue.

Hold the nose-ring tight and do not allow even a doubt.

— Kakuan

Masters Apprentice

2010-01-26T16:24:00.000+11:00

There is a voice calling for me
There is a light coming down on me
There is a doubt that is clearing
There is a day that is dawning
There is a wound that is healing
There is a season waiting for me
There is a road that is turning
There is a fire still burning

A sickness in me
Constant pace towards the end
The need is stronger
This time the need is deeper

There is a peace I am searching
There is a freedom I'm depending on
There is a pain that's never ending
There is a rain falling only on me
There is a dream I am living
There is a life I'm dreaming of
There is a death I'm awaiting
There is a home I am deserting

I hold my breath in wait
Only moments remain
Movement for departed hope
Effect for absent friends

Sever the faith from my body
Leave me begging for more
Take what I have and deliver me
Into everlasting sleep

Soothing trance
Colours fade
And disappear
Ethereal light
Showing me what I can do without

In a motionless scene
There is only me
I take what I can
Controlling you to get ahead

Fading away
And leaving
Long for sleep
Closer now
Lead the way into death

Every wretched dream
I've left behind
Every waking hour
I lie in wait

Sucked inside by will
Gone into the flood
All my questions unfurled
As I was put to the test

Once I'm below there's no turning back

Plunging into the deepest void
Departed shell left drained behind

Pacing roads unknown
Searching for a new home
Desert in my eye
Barren lands inside

— Mikael Akerfeldt, "Masters Apprentice" from Deliverance. [Opeth's best track, in my opinion, along with "A Fair Judgment".]

Bad teachers

2010-01-25T21:49:00.000+11:00

A counterpart to the parable about the sower and the seed.

It would deal with preachers.

The owner of a wheat farm gave each of his servants an equal share of equally good wheat seed.

But one stored the seed in a damp place where it sprouted too soon and was spoiled.

And one mixed it with ordinary seed.

And one thought: the seed now belongs to me, why should I sow it, and he sold it for money.

And one did sow it but scattered it so carelessly that it was worthless.

One sowed it but put too high a price on it.

— Søren Kierkegaard, 1845, The Book of the Judge

A story

2010-01-16T16:18:00.000+11:00

What a clever story it is, the one in 1001 Nights (Geschichte der zwei neidischen Schwestern, Nacht 617-637, III) that tells of an expedition in search of the talking bird, the singing tree, and the golden water. The task was to climb a high mountain. But the resistance was invisible (as the dervish in fact says to the one prince who was not afraid of any danger: Have you considered what it means to do battle with the invisible); it was nothing more nor less than voices that shouted and made an uproar, scolded, shocked, whined, ridiculed, etc. — and if one looked around he became a stone.

— Søren Kierkegaard, 1848

Boundaries - Things

2010-01-01T15:22:00.000+11:00

Consider "there are no inherent boundaries" and "there are no inherently existent things". The former is accepted by most people, for to them it means EXISTENCE is supreme. They hear "there is existence, therefore me, and since existence is supreme, therefore, I am free to act and move in any way".

They have understood themselves to be supreme, like long-lasting parasitic lice feeding on the blood of a large mammal. They (brainlessly) assume their own consciousness travels the environment like a submarine, a louse freely travelling the mammal's body, the Lord of the Blood.

So they accept with fervour "there are no inherent boundaries", but only in a very restricted sense (that is, they contradict it altogether). And that is why the latter phrase makes no sense to them.

— Kelly Jones, 2009

Great Death

2009-12-30T22:39:00.000+11:00

When Zen master Sekiso passed away and the brotherhood asked the head monk to succeed him as abbot, Zen master Kyuho, who had previously served as the master's attendant, came and addressed them. He posed a question to the head monk, "The master often told us to `cease all activity,' to `do nothing whatever,' to `become so cold and lifeless the spirits of the dead will come sighing around you,' to `become a bolt of fine white silk,' to `become the dead ashes in a censer left forgotten in an ancient graveyard,' to `become so that the present instant is ten thousand years.'

"What is the meaning of these instructions? If you show that you grasp them, you are the next abbot. If you show that you do not, you aren't the man for the job."

"His words," said the head monk, "refer to the essential oneness of all things."

"You have failed to understand the master's meaning," said Kyuho.

"Get some incense ready," replied the head monk. "If I have terminated my life by the time that incense burns, it will mean I grasped the master's meaning. If I am still living, it will mean I did not."

Kyuho lit a stick of incense. Before it had burned down the head monk had ceased breathing. Kyuho patted the dead man on the back, and said, "Others have died while seated; some have died while standing. But you have just succeeded in proving that you could not have even seen the master's meaning in your dreams."

— Hakuin

The deep-loving beast-form of Sunyata barrelling towards nonduality

2009-12-30T22:32:00.001+11:00

I love those that know not how to live except as down-goers, for they are the over-goers.

I love the great despisers, because they are the great adorers, and arrows of longing for the other shore.

I love those who do not first seek a reason beyond the stars for going down and being sacrifices, but sacrifice themselves to the earth, that the earth of the Superman may hereafter arrive.

I love him who liveth in order to know, and seeketh to know in order that the Superman may hereafter live. Thus seeketh he his own down-going.

I love him who laboureth and inventeth, that he may build the house for the Superman, and prepare for him earth, animal, and plant: for thus seeketh he his own down-going.

I love him who loveth his virtue: for virtue is the will to down-going, and an arrow of longing.

I love him who reserveth no share of spirit for himself, but wanteth to be wholly the spirit of his virtue: thus walketh he as spirit over the bridge.

...

I love him who chasteneth his God, because he loveth his God: for he must succumb through the wrath of his God.

I love him whose soul is deep even in the wounding, and may succumb through a small matter: thus goeth he willingly over the bridge.

I love him whose soul is so overfull that he forgetteth himself, and all things are in him: thus all things become his down-going.

I love him who is of a free spirit and a free heart: thus is his head only the bowels of his heart; his heart, however, causeth his down-going.

— Friedrich Nietzsche, Thus Spake Zarathustra

How idiocy is perpetuated through generations

2009-12-24T14:04:00.000+11:00

From the first catch-phrases flung at a child to the last, it is like a series of shocks to freeze his motor, to undercut the power of his consciousness. "Don't ask so many questions, children should be seen and not heard!" — "Who are you to think? It's so, because I say so!" — "Don't argue, obey!" — "Don't try to understand, believe!" — "Don't rebel, adjust!" — "Don't stand out, belong!" — "Don't struggle, compromise" — "Your heart is more important than your mind!" — "Who are you to know? Your parents know best!" — "Who are you to know? Society knows best!" — "Who are you to know? The bureaucrats know best!" — "Who are you to object? All values are relative!" — "Who are you to want to escape a thug's bullet? That's only a personal prejudice!"

— Ayn Rand, Atlas Shrugged

Waking

2009-12-19T14:13:00.002+11:00

Wake to the day with the joy and zest of having arrived in Heaven. All will be well for you. Sit back and enjoy! What can possibly touch you, who are beyond space and time? Be as a dead man, the dead man you are, untouched by the worries and concerns of this world.

— Kevin Solway, Poison for the Heart

Misuse of mass media, and immediacy

2009-12-12T20:25:00.004+11:00

With the press as degenerate as it is, human beings eventually will surely be transformed into clods. A newspaper's first concern has to be circulation; from then on the rule for what it publishes can be: the wittiness and entertainment of printing something that has no relation to communication through the press. How significant! How easy to be witty when misuse of the press has become the newly invented kind of witticism.

For example, they write that a certain well-known person (mentioned by name) wears an embroidered shirt. This is written and then read by the whole market town where the lunatic press thrives. The man is cartooned with an embroidered shirt and this treatment goes on for half a year — and naturally is the most widely read of everything read in the market town. If this is not either lunacy or idiocy, then I know of no other alternative. People are simply too immediate and momentary, but on this scale it is a non plus ultra — to use the circulation of the press to discuss for half a year something which, after all, the most addle-brained person ought to be sufficiently human not to talk about for more than five minutes — it can only lead to idiocy.

— Søren Kierkegaard, 1847

A strong mind

2009-12-05T23:55:00.003+11:00

A strong mind

The written word of a thinker is structured by the organisation of logic, rather than by the standards of conventional communication in language which have come to show no sign of this; even more, the thinker – the true thinker who lives in thought – has his very being in thought, and the meaning conveyed in his thought has a far different meaning to the standards conveyed in conventional language. To state this simply, reality is truly understood, and only understood, with thought, and this thought has rejected the form and convention of animal culture.

There is no salvation through reading the written word expressed by a thinker, since the desire to lay hold of the truth engineered through another is not the key to truth, but a distancing from it. Even the act of turning to one's own writings with this desire for an outward form, for an outward encapsulation, distances one from the truth that is only actualised with one's own thought.

Thought is the only arena for understanding. It is not reading, it is not writing, it is not speaking, and it is not listening. Thought is the only arena, the only workshop, the only engine, powerful enough to create understanding. All words must come from meanings manipulated by one's own mind, and even more, one must actually construct and invent the meanings wholly within one's own finely-scrutinising intellect, for there to be any real and lasting understanding.

The written word, or any meanings conveyed by another, are nothing but a tossed-away cocoon, a hardened residue of the arrival of understanding. These are relics of something already past, not the source of, nor the crystallised agent of salvation. They can do no more than stimulate one who has lost inwardness, whose mind is weak, to seek again that inwardness for himself. They cannot substitute.

The written word is no achievement.

Aphorisms

2009-12-05T23:54:00.000+11:00

The mind has no dust needing to be swept away, or dirt collected on a window-glass obscuring some bright scene. There is always the ever-pure without any inherent form or shape to clasp to; everything is the glory of the empty void which has no inherent form but presents as all that is and can be.

There is no equanimity when there is equanimity: the balance between happiness and sadness is a false equanimity which needs to stay between somethings. But as there is nothing, therefore there is no equanimity – that is equanimity.

It is not „who is it that is being angry or upset?“ but rather, „how is it possible to become upset when the beginning or ending of what is imagined to be a bad thing is actually only imaginary?“

It is not „when did that thing really occur which is imagined to be hurtful?“ but rather „did something really come into existence at all?“

It is not „has something come into existence?“ but „why this sudden need to grasp onto something?“

Why lose the ungraspable and try to grasp it? Know that one has everything already.

Indeed: Awake in the morning with the joy of having arrived in heaven. All will be well. It is true: one is already in heaven – or rather, there is neither heaven or hell. There is nothing but everything already. There is nothing attained, nothing lost.

Know the eternal. Meditate on the ever-present if you ever feel inclined to think it could change from one minute to the next. Just sit with what is, then you may dance and float and always be motionless.

Truthless spontaneity

2009-12-05T23:51:00.000+11:00

The tragedy of our time is that it is altogether momentary. If a man gets an idea, he wants to have it promptly accepted. Yeah, Great, Do It! If someone else had gotten the idea of individuality, he would immediately have supplied it with so many adherents that the whole thing would have fizzled out since the manifestation would have become the mob of followers and the idea of individuality would have been disregarded.

— Kierkegaard, 1847

The Crowd - The Individual

2009-11-30T14:54:00.006+11:00

"The crowd" is really what I have aimed at polemically, and that I have learned from Socrates. I want to make men aware so that they do not waste and squander their lives. The aristocrats take for granted that there is always a whole mass of men who go to waste. But they remain silent about it, live secluded, and act as if these many, many human beings did not exist at all. This is the wickedness of the aristocrats' exclusiveness — that in order to have an easy life themselves they do not even make people aware.

That is not what I want. I want to make the crowd aware of their own ruin, and if they are unwilling to respond to the good, then I will constrain them with evil. Understand me — or do not misunderstand me. I do not intend to strike them (alas, one cannot strike the crowd) — no, I will constrain them to strike me. Thus I will still be constraining them with evil. For if they strike me first — they will surely become aware — and if they kill me — then they will become unconditionally aware, and I will have won absolute victory. In that respect my constitution is thoroughly dialectical. Already there are many who say, "What does anyone care about Magister Kierkegaard? I'll show him." Ah, but showing me that they do not care about me or taking the trouble to get me to realise that they do not care about me is still dependence. It will work out just that way if one simply has enough ataraxy. They show me respect precisely by showing me that they do not respect me.

Men are not so corrupt that they actually desire evil, but they are blind and really do not know what they are doing. Everything centers on drawing them out into the area of decision. A child can be somewhat unruly toward his father for a long time, but if the father can only get the child to make a real attack, the child is far closer to being saved. The revolt of the "masses" is victorious if we step aside for it so that it never comes to know what it is doing. The crowd is not essentially reflective; therefore, if it puts a man to death, it is eo ipso brought to a stop, becomes aware, and deliberates.

The reformer who, as they say, fights a power (a pope, an emperor, in short, an individual man) has to bring about the downfall of the mighty one; but he who with justice alone confronts "the crowd", from which comes all corruption, must see to it that he himself falls.

— Kierkegaard, 1847

Running out of ideas

2009-10-15T20:40:00.000+11:00

If one lacks the faith to dissolve oneself in a sea of wisdom, one can still occupy oneself in a relatively noble fashion with ideas of truth. The problem is, ideas run out. It is not long before you ahve thought all thoughts, and perhaps written all ideas, and they cease to thrill. One's ink runs dry.

The temptation is now to fall back into the immediacy of common worldliness, where there is at least some pleasure, some colour, however shallow.

The wise never run short of ideas, because they seek no joy in them, and thus find no pain. Their strength arises from their having sacrificed knowledge, and having become all-knowledge.

— Kevin Solway

Kierkegaard and epilepsy

2009-10-10T20:36:00.005+11:00

Kierkegaard probably did suffer from epileptic fits, as described by Heidi and Leif Bork Hansen in their essay "Kirkegaard's Epilepsy: The Intriguing Secret of the Machinery". It is not altogether true, however, that Kirkegaard's conception of the Infinite was influenced by his epileptic experiences. Kirkegaard noted many times in his Journals that his "thorn in the flesh" was something he strove not to give into, and was aware that it was a untruth.

It was not, as the Hansens surmise, a direct result of his God-relationship, as a sort of divinely raised whip of discipline. Rather, Kierkegaard knew his illness as a psychosomatic combination of melancholy, and the psychological strain of his penitentiary education, under the ideals of reverence for his father and respect for his beloved:

At one time my condition was such that I had the burden of anguish which I may call my thorn in the flesh: a sorrow, a mental anguish related to my late father, a deep grief related to that beloved girl and everything that was involved. Thus I believed that, compared to the ordinary man, I mgiht be said to be carrying a heavy burden.

Kierkegaard was always sickly, and knew it. From childhood, his illness forced him to concentrate on the intellectual. He could not be one of the "universals" - a physically sound, robust, worldly fellow. His epilepsy was an important cause in his development as an extraordinary genius. In the same vein, it would have caused him to become acutely self-aware, to watch out for signs of approaching fits, so as to manage his neurological states better. But it is important to make a clear distinction between this kind of self-monitoring and the other kind of spiritual monitoring which makes up the body of his journal entries entitled, "About myself". Occasionally, he uses such entries to control any hypochondriac or depressive moods, but he is largely writing about how to adjust his moods and thoughts to a higher psychology, in the wake of various stressful events.

The Hansens imply that the temporal lobe seizure ("God-experience") that epileptics often use to justify belief in God was relevant to Kierkegaard's case. However, Kierkegaard did not identify the God-relationship as an altered state of consciousness, for, he did not value the idea of drawing close to God on Sundays, "quiet hours", or in special moments. The God-relationship was a 24/7/365 thing for Kierkegaard. Also, anyone who would argue that Kierkegaard's religiousness was entwined with his epileptic fits would have to argue that Kierkegaard thought Jesus, or the God-man prototype, should have similar fits in order to be religious. It is the kind of argument one would make who had no knowledge of Kierkegaard's emphasis on the education. If Kierkegaard indeed thought that epileptics were the true apostles, he would have been outright interested in finding epileptics and would have preached people into trances, rather than discoursing on purely intellectual ideas.

Similarly, the Hansens imply that Kierkegaard broke his engagement with Regina Olsen because of the epilepsy, but this is false. Kierkegaard's melancholy was something more closely aligned with his reverence for his father, having been made aware at an early age that the most noble man is rejected by society, and it was this characteristic melancholy, combined with his sickliness (creating a penchant for the otherworldly, the intellectual, the idea), which he knew would make the marriage a lie. He was unable to share candidly this inner life with Regina, and knew that any such marriage would be a farce.

Kierkegaard did indeed write compulsively, but this cannot be entirely put down to epileptic hypergraphia. Any genius wishes to control and restrain thought, to find and iterate the idea. Writing one's ideas profusely, as well as speaking or reading, are means to do this. In addition, Kierkegaard regarded his writings as to be read aloud, and mentions that he often speaks what he is to write, before he writes, to ensure the idea is expressed well. It is not entirely out of the question that a bachelor living alone, who has no object in life but his authorship (which was his penitentiary education), no past-times like watching television or gallivanting around the countryside, and whose daily life mostly included hours of thinking and writing, would write a lot.

The Hansens, who have never entered into the life of genius, have made inferences about Kierkegaard's life based on their ignorance. It would seem that their intention is to help publicise their own services as "humanitarian therapists" and to help again to destroy human consciousness of the spiritual man.

Verses on Wisdom

2009-08-11T09:27:00.002+10:00

That which I am, if I am finite,
is a part of the Infinite,
  And since all parts of the Infinite are the body of the Infinite,
    therefore I am the Infinite.

I am the Infinite.
Everything I do is the Infinite.
The Infinite is me.
There is no separation between us.
I am the Infinite.

The barrier that separates me from attaining wisdom
is a real barrier,
  But I cross it in an instant
     when the Infinite has blown away the smoke.

I seek truth,
but in what?
If I want truth that is utterly reliable,
then only the Infinite can supply.
I, a finite thing, am different every moment,
and satisfying ideas shift and swirl.
But what is still here, amidst the chaos?
Even when I am gone, what remains?
The Infinite.

My past habits constrain,
dreams echo in new circumstances;
so I experience repetition.
But let me remember my true identity,
and I experience freedom from karma.
The repetition ends.
Then I find circumstances are what they are,
instead of vehicles to relive the past.

Death no longer signifies loss or change;
   I grieve no more, because the Infinite is real to me.
Illness or the strains of poverty become sweet,
though it seems insane to think so.
   Even the slander of fools becomes sweet,
     though I wish they could taste this sweetness,
     and not the bitterness of cyclical existence.

One needs no longer to reach for heavens,
or be demoralised by the hells of human society.
But live moment by moment,
seeing the Infinite in everything.
  The burden of human suffering lifts,
     and one can function as Nature permits.

The Significance of the Pseudonyms

2009-08-05T19:31:00.000+10:00

All communication of truth has become abstract: the public has become the authority; the newspapers call themselves the editorial staff; the professor calls himself speculation; the pastor is meditation; no man, none, dares to say I.

But since without qualification the first prerequisite for the communication of truth is personality, since "truth" cannot possibly be served by ventriloquism, personality has to come to the fore again.

But in these circumstances, since the world was so corrupted by never hearing an I, it was impossible to begin at once with one's own I. So it became my task to create author-personalities and let them enter in the actuality of life in order to get men a bit accustomed to hearing discourse in the first person.

Thus my task is no doubt only that of a forerunner until he comes who in the strictest sense says: I.

But to make a turn away from this inhuman abstraction to personality — that is my work.

— Kierkegaard, mid-1849

Away with revolutions, and "we, the avant-garde"

2009-08-05T18:26:00.000+10:00

The wrong way is much too close, wanting to reform, to arouse the whole world — instead of oneself, and this certainly is the wrong way for hotheads with a lot of imagination.

Mediocrity

2009-07-07T19:46:00.000+10:00

This is mediocrity: to want to be along a little bit in those certain things requiring complete capability.

- Kierkegaard, mid-1849

The test of an individual

2009-07-03T21:18:00.001+10:00

A person says, it is impossible to be certain of the truth in their own opinions. This person is genuinely uncertain when speaking this, because of saying exactly what represents them only. But immediately thereafter, they remember that another person has also said that it is impossible to be certain of the truth of their own opinions, with the same genuine uncertainty and humble quiet countenance, and that remembrance gives them assurance. So they reassert with confidence that it is not possible to be certain of the truth of their own opinions.... only the truth of someone else's.

This is a very common phenomenon, which means, most everyone has an opinion - and it is someone else's.

Oh, how relieved we are to find that our troubled uncertainties are reaffirmed by another person. Now the troubled uncertainty dissipates, for we are safe in the crowd.

Another kind of memento mori

2009-06-18T22:19:00.000+10:00

The fashion designer (in Stages) gets the idea of starting a fashionable boutique, one section devoted entirely to dressing corpses; thus for the corpse to be dressed in vogue is equivalent to being buried in Christian ground, that is, the latest interpretation.

Human sympathy — Enlightened understanding

2009-06-05T21:39:00.001+10:00

Life prompts one to become aware of the many, many less endowed, weak, simple men, women, and children, the sick and the sorrowful, etc., who live among us. Life says to the religious: Confronted by all these people, can you have the heart to jack up the price of the religious, of salvation, as high as you are doing, you cruel person. And if the religious person is truly religious and consequently has love in his heart, this objection will make a deep impression on him, one who wants so much to be with those who suffer, whose only joy and consolation, after all, is to comfort those who suffer.

But the objection is the spiritual trial of "human sympathy." ....

The point is that the religious person unconditionally shall and must have sympathy for all the weak; he wants to be with them, comfort them, and all that, but he does not dare do it — that is, he does not dare center his life in this sympathy so that instead of remaining true to God he scales down and remains in the religiosity of sympathy.

As soon as a religious person ceases to comprehend it this way: I dare not, I cannot do otherwise (that is, he is in the power of the absolute, absolute obedience is demanded of him), he will be side-tracked and will remain in the religiosity of sympathy.

The danger for the religious person who is in the religiousness of the absolute is, of course, self-righteousness, that he becomes arrogant instead of pious, that he wants to be better than other men or puts God, as it were, in his debt, or at least has a self-satisfied consciousness of having done his part.

For this reason such a religious person will usually have a secret strain, comparable to Paul's "thorn in the flesh," which gives him the bold confidence to go on, because it teaches him that he is nothing and truly makes this truth in him. No one can venture out into absolute religiousness on his own; he must begin in an altogether singular understanding with God. Under other circumstance, that which in absolute religiousness is dialectically cruel becomes outright cruelty, sin, guilt.

— Kierkegaard, 1849

The importance of venturing even just a little

2009-05-31T00:57:00.001+10:00

To me he is an example and proof that a man does not understand more than his life expresses. This explains his opinion that the opposition I have had of late is nemesis or God's punishment.

— Kierkegaard, (1849)

What is it to be a poet?

2009-05-17T21:03:00.000+10:00

What is it to be a poet? It is to have one's own personal life, one's actuality, in categories completely different from those of one's poetical production, to be related to the ideal only in imagination, so that one's personal life is more or less a satire on the poetry and on oneself. In this sense all modern thinkers, even the outstanding ones (I mean the Germans, for there simply are no Danish thinkers), are poets. And on the whole this is the maximum to be seen in life. Most men live utterly destitute of ideas; some few relate poetically to the ideal but deny it in their personal lives. Pastors likewise are poets, and since they are pastors they are "deceivers," as Socrates once called poets, in a much deeper way than poets are.

But here as everywhere demoralization has come about through the disappearance of position no. 1 and the assumption of position no. 1 by no. 2. Relating oneself to the ideal in one's personal life is never seen. Such a life is the life of the witness to the truth. This rubric disappeared long ago, and preachers, philosophy professors, and poets have taken over the place of servants to the truth, whereby they no doubt are served very well — but they do not serve the truth.

— Kierkegaard, 1849

Epigram — Aphorism

2009-05-16T19:38:00.000+10:00

Definition of epigram:

An epigram is a succinct statement of great wit. It is not a definition, because it is not didactic. It is prose, not poetry, in the sense that the idea (encapsulated in the statement) is not presented as a lyrical speculation but as a direct and living expression of its own meaning. It is monadic, being a complete idea, that conveys its meaning in the very structure of how it is expressed.

For example, Kierkegaard, a master of the epigram, often referred to his own life as an epigram on his contemporaries. This indicates the nature of the epigram, that its meaning points to the truth of things, but in a deeply personal way. In the following paragraph, the last sentence is a double epigram.

'I could be tempted to say that I have taken one examination more than most people, although it is true enough that this examination is of such a nature that one or another has submitted to it who otherwise is not an examinee — I allowed the ardor of my feelings to be examined by a woman. Whatever I have suffered because I staked everything on that desire and once again staked everything on it since she asked for it, and yet once again staked everything on it, I who must bear the responsibility and be the agent — I still had strength enough, in order to mitigate the affair for her, to give the impression that I was a villain, a deceiver. Thus a murder was placed upon my conscience; it was said and repeated as solemnly as possible, that this would be her death. Therefore this girl was the examiner. One and a half years later she was engaged again — since that time I have scarcely spoken to a young girl, and no thought has been more alien to my soul than to want to fall in love again or even to think about it.

If at times it has satisfied my anger to be like an epigram over my contemporaries, here I have learned how woeful it is to be an epigram in that way.'

Definition of aphorism:

An aphorism is a succinct statement, that presents a principle, or the essence or genius of an idea, and is more didactic in nature than the epigram. However, the vital key to presenting the principle is the same reflective dialectic as found in the epigram. That is, the meaning of an aphorism is also expressed in the actual mechanics of its structure and wording, perhaps more than in the actual words chosen. The aphorism puts Truth before the man and the man expresses Truth, whereas the epigram uses man to see Truth which explains its more lyrical nature.

Kevin Solway is a master of aphoristic writing, having drawn out the nuggets of truth from many scriptures. His "Poison for the Heart" is full of aphorisms.

Reduplication

2009-01-18T23:09:00.001+11:00

What does it mean to work against oneself? It is quite simple. If the established, the traditional, etc., in the context of which a beginning is to be made, is sound, thoroughly sound — well, then apply directly what has to be applied; in any case there can be no talk or thought of reforming, for if the established is sound, then there is nothing, after all, to reform.

Conversely, to the same degree that the established, consequently there where one's striving begins, is corrupt, to the same degree it will become increasingly necessary dialectically to work against oneself, lest the innovation resulting from direct action is itself corrupted the minute it succeeds, and thus is not maintained in its heterogeneity.

— Kierkegaard, 1850

Shaving

2009-01-18T15:29:00.002+11:00

A saying often quoted:

"I don't mow lawns for the same reason that I don't shave."

— Kevin Solway

Yet this man both mows lawns and shaves. He does it for exactly the same reason.

Love

2009-01-18T15:24:00.002+11:00

God's love is the inescapable effects of living according to the truth: when one sacrifices the ego, life as it truly is is revealed. This sacrifice and the life after sacrificing ego is the love of the Infinite. That is, the Infinite cannot help but be what it is - and accepting this shows oneself in one's true and best light.

God's love is to make a man bored with life itself - since life/death is the duality that engenders and perpetuates the ego - not bored over things but sick to death of things, so that he is willing and wills death - since death is the death of duality. Then he is living without the constant rope-walking uncertainty of a dualistic mind, but, dying, experiences that what is cannot help to be but what is.

From Hakuin Ekaku

2009-01-18T15:22:00.003+11:00

Soft-butter duck egg, melts from the top of the head, throughout the body.

-

Let heartfire upper-body descend and intermingle with water lower-body (intellect descends into the elixir field underneath the navel).

-

1000 breaths with motionless feather on the nose; breaths continue until all is breath --- a sea.

From Thomas Merton

2009-01-18T15:19:00.003+11:00

It is precisely pride that prevents modern man from achieving depth, even when he most seeks it.

-

The Zen man does not strictly speaking practise meditation at all, in any sense familiar to us in the West. Rather he enters into a purifying struggle against conceptual knowledge, in which he 'sweats out' his attachment to images, ideas, symbols, metaphors, analytic judgments, etc. as means for grasping, appreciating, and understanding reality.

-

There is no self-display, because the 'true self', which functions in Zen experience, is empty, invisible, and incapable of being displayed.

Thinking and the Infinite

2009-01-18T15:18:00.003+11:00

There are no problems, really, so intellectualising turns the wheel... if done blindly. Think, knowing it is God .. Nature .. Infinite .. that does all.

Patience - Complacency

2009-01-18T00:25:00.001+11:00

In my opinion the tragedy of the world is simply this — human shortsightedness, many times well meaning, has thought somewhat along these lines: if on the whole you want the truth, then if once in a while a little consideration of your own advantage infiltrates, if at times a slightly tainted expedient sneaks in, it is of little consequence, and besides, that is how the world is, every practical man knows that, and I cannot remake the world.

O, you impatient, shortsighted one. No, remake the world, you certainly cannot. Well, then do what you can, live in quiet obscurity, working for your own living. Such a person at least does no harm. But if you want to work for the truth, then ponder before God exactly by what standard you are able to do it. Let it be according to a modest standard, in God's name, but promise God and yourself and hold to it that you will unconditionally use the purest means according to the standard.

The other is nothing but impatience and shortsightedness, and it has done irreparable harm.

Sheep voting sheep-style

2009-01-17T23:38:00.000+11:00

There is something dreadful about seeing individuals rushing into this mutual insuring, which does not, as does other insurance, cover shipwrecks, but which, the mutual insuring itself, is a commune naufragium.

— Søren Kierkegaard

Buying sweets - Buying suffering

2008-12-27T12:17:00.000+11:00

A pagan (Cicero, in De finibus) relates that the greatest sensualist in the Orient (Sardanapalus) put on his tombstone: I took all the pleasures of the world with me to the grave — to which another pagan (Aristotle) is supposed to have said: How so? You could not even hold on to a single one of them while you were living.

— Kierkegaard

Both-And --- Either/Or

2008-12-21T22:50:00.000+11:00

From a strictly Christian point of view, what we men call earnestness in contrast to diversion is often nothing but diversion.

— Kierkegaard

Suffering

2008-12-18T16:10:00.000+11:00

Emotional suffering when young is a vital ingredient for becoming wise. It is necessary to learn how painful life can be, and that being alive and experiencing is not intrinsically enjoyable.

This is not sadomasochism.

A deep, lasting, strong experience of emotional pain will force a person to become indifferent to life. If they can bear up under that pain, without sinking into self-pity or suicidalism, then they are able to reflect on what it is that makes life different to not-living.

They become dwellers in the land of thought, imagination, and reflection.

If they can live in between life and death, with no strong attachment to either, neither wishing to "make merry and forget their woes" or to "celebrate destruction and nihilism", then they become thinkers and are likely to have some wise insights.

Images

2008-12-18T15:34:00.000+11:00

A link to some interesting images.

Regarding the starry evening sky

2008-12-17T11:08:00.000+11:00

Alas, but man is still an animal-creature, and the indolent inclination to ape and mimic seems to be his second nature. That is why it is so very easy to collect them in a herd; that a proclaimer will get thousands who want to learn what he says by rote, perhaps become professors of it — but perhaps not one in ten thousand who himself gazes at the starry evening sky. But are not the proclaimers all too frequently to blame when the whole thing becomes aping and copying, for it is to their earthly and temporal advantage. Be unprincipled, if you will, toward the starry evening sky, make it seem that what is glorious is not the starry evening sky but your conception of it, get a few blaring knights of commerce on your staff, and you will soon get a crowd who will pay a fancy price for your wonderful instruction. Ah, but if you are honest toward the starry evening sky, if you tell the truth and declare that the glory belongs to it and that every man could if he would see its glory in his own way, and that his own way means infinitely much more to him than yours to him or his to you: well, then there is really no occasion for making money or for animal-like crowding together in herds.

— Kierkegaard

mediocrity

2008-12-09T16:24:00.000+11:00

...any crime is far preferable to this self-satisfied, smiling, cheerful, blissful demoralisation: mediocrity.

Soren Kierkegaard

The knife edge of living according to the truth

2008-12-01T17:01:00.000+11:00

Resignation to the Infinite is a simple matter. It just means following one's reason in regards the nature of ultimate reality. It just means: stop building something. This indeed is easy.

But now arises the difficulty. Karma (one's memory, habits, routines, preferences, and a life-time of deep-engrained beliefs) is all about building the self up, building anything up, as a safe haven in reality. This sets one's whole being against reason. This is the personal struggle, of ongoing and profound resignation. Perhaps after many years, one finds new force in the habit of reason. So one starts to 'float' and the habit of constructing fades.

But now arises a greater difficulty. One floats, living beside things, resigned to any environment and any experience. One's higher understanding, emptied of a need for self - reputation, accomplishment, experience to fall back on, etc. - stands in collision with the entire human environment. Clearly, one values the highest and purest resignation possible. And because of this valuing, there is a struggle against wishing for the entire human environment to be dragged up and educated.

So here is the collision with the world. In the same instant, there is the old danger, of the ego wanting to protect itself by destroying a worldful of threats (human evil), posed with a higher expression of the same (wanting all other selves to resemble oneself), posed with a purer, higher form of ego (wanting to be a self that exists with no attachment to any environment), posed with an even higher ego that values not protecting the false self by hiding in a selfish, unattacked, private heavenly bliss, posed with an even higher ego that submits its claims to accomplish anything and simply enters into the world with a deep consciousness of the true state of affairs.

And in this collision is that awareness that no matter how one does try within the world to educate, one's resignation - to these enormous demands on consciousness to run the program of reason through every level of egotistical rebellion in oneself consistently and constantly - will enforce the belief in others that one is half-mad, obsessive, depressive, and doing something torturously unnatural - and they will flee one.

Maneating is spiritual obesity and it kills

2008-12-01T15:48:00.000+11:00

Preachers and professors eat the dead. Novelists, writers of romances, and minor authors eat even the living. It never occurs to such a scoundrel that he could assist some greater excellence not to succumb. O, no, even if he could, he owes it to his trade not to do it lest he miss out on a poetic motif and the public's eagerness for just that sort of writing.

- Kierkegaard

(A confessional demonstration of my own maneating)

Sublimation - Subliminal

2008-12-01T10:27:00.000+11:00

Sublime:
transitive verb
1: to cause to pass directly from the solid to the vapor state and condense back to solid form
2 a (1): to elevate or exalt especially in dignity or honor
(2): to render finer (as in purity or excellence)
b: to convert (something inferior) into something of higher worth
intransitive verb: to pass directly from the solid to the vapor state
[Etymology: C14th Middle English, from Middle French sublimer, from Medieval Latin sublimare to refine, sublime, from Latin sublimis to elevate.]

Sublimation: to divert the expression of (an instinctual desire or impulse) from its unacceptable form to one that is considered more socially or culturally acceptable.
[Etymology: C15th Middle English, from Medieval Latin sublimatus, past participle of sublimare]

----

Subliminal:
1: inadequate to produce a sensation or a perception
2: existing or functioning below the threshold of consciousness
[Etymology: 1886 sub- + Latin limin-, limen threshold]

A story

2008-11-26T18:47:00.000+11:00

His character was weak; moreover he had a great sense and fondness for enjoying life, and not the simpler pleasures but the more refined ones, yes, the most refined of all: being honored, esteemed, and respected as a man of earnestness, character, and principles, a man who stands firm when everything shakes, etc.

He was in fact a very gifted man intellectually, an exceptional orator, and definitely was brilliantly shrewd.

This combination is Bishop M., and this combination has managed to confuse a whole generation with respect to Christianity. For his weakness of character is never seen, since it is covered up by his brilliant shrewdness; his desire for pleasure is never seen, it is accepted as — a new refinement! — devout freedom of spirit in contrast to pietistic anxiety.

-- Kierkegaard, 1854

Spirit

2008-06-11T22:25:00.000+10:00

By primitivity Christianity does not of course mean the usual fanfare about the intellectual, about being a genius and the like. No; primitivity, spirit, means staking your life and putting the kingdom of God first, first, first. The more literally a person can accept this, and act accordingly, the more primitivity he has.

....Anyone who has persevered in living up to his primitivity has a reliable knowledge of existence, may be rated an able seaman on life's ocean, has something he can vouch for. If a blushing (oh, Socrates!) youth turns to such a man he will not talk a lot of moonshine, nor will he offer the youth that sham reliability: be like the others.

....primitivity - having to be primitive, alone with God without being preceded by others whom one can ape and to whom one can refer for corroboration - is something people accept most reluctantly. All deadening of spirit is bound up with this historical taking shelter and making a pretext of the innumerable millions who have lived before us.

— Kierkegaard (1854, year before dying)

Genius in confrontation with the choice between happiness (women, society) and morality

2008-06-04T18:12:00.000+10:00

The reason why madness overtakes so many men of genius - fools believe it comes from the influence of Venus, or the spinal degeneration of neurasthenics - is that for many the burden becomes too heavy, the task of bearing the whole world on the shoulders, like Atlas, intolerable for the smaller, but never for the really mighty minds. But the higher a man mounts, the greater may be his fall; all genius is a conquering of chaos, mystery, and darkness, and if it degenerates and goes to pieces, the ruin is greater in proportion to the success. The genius which runs to madness is no longer genius; it has chosen happiness instead of morality. All madness is the outcome of the insupportability of suffering attached to all consciousness.

— Otto Weininger

The man of genius possesses, like everything else, the complete female in himself; but woman herself is only a part of the Universe, and the part can never be the whole; femaleness can never include genius. This lack of genius on the part of woman is inevitable because woman is not a monad, and cannot reflect the Universe.

— Otto Weininger

It is certainly true that most men need some kind of a God. A few, and they are the men of genius, do not bow to an alien law. The rest try to justify their doings and misdoings, their thinking and existence (at least the menial side of it), to some one else, whether it be the personal God of the Jews, or a beloved, respected, and revered human being. It is only in this way that they can bring their lives under the social law. . . .

— Otto Weininger

Woman and Genius

2008-06-04T17:44:00.000+10:00

It is through woman that ideality is born into the world and - what were man without her! There is many a man who has become a genius through a woman, many a one a hero, many a one a poet, many a one even a saint; but he did not become a genius through the woman he married, for through her he only became a privy councillor; he did not become a hero through the woman he married, for through her he only became a general; he did not become a poet through the woman he married, for through her he only became a father; he did not become a saint through the woman he married, for he did not marry, and would have married but one - the one whom he did not marry; just as the others became a genius, became a hero, became a poet through the help of the woman they did not marry.

— Kierkegaard

Women, in general, are not attracted to art at all, nor knowledge, and not at all to genius.

— Rousseau

Male conspiracy cannot explain all female failures. I am convinced that, even without restrictions, there still would have been no female Pascal, Milton, or Kant. Genius is not checked by social obstacles: it will overcome.

— Camille Paglia, in Sexual Personae

There are no female geniuses because there are no female Jack-the-Rippers.

— Camille Paglia

Women of genius commonly have masculine faces, figures and manners. In transplanting brains to an alien soil God leaves a little of the original earth clinging to the roots.

— Ambrose Bierce

Genius

2008-06-04T17:37:00.001+10:00

Genius does what it must, and Talent does what it can.

— Owen Meredith Earl of Lytton

Communion with Nature

2008-06-03T09:39:00.000+10:00

One can very well eat lettuce before its heart has been formed; still, the delicate crispness of the heart and its lovely frizz are something altogether different from the leaves. It is the same in the world of the spirit. Being too busy has this result: that an individual very, very rarely is permitted to form a heart; on the other hand, the thinker, the poet, or the religious personality who actually has formed his heart, will never be popular, not because he is difficult, but because it demands quiet and prolonged working with oneself and intimate knowledge of oneself as well as a certain isolation. Even if, in a full-toned voice, I could say something that would please each and every one, if it were of a religious nature I would not say it, because it is already a kind of religious indecency that it should be necessary to make an outcry about it; on the contrary, religious things have to do with a softly murmured soliloquy with oneself. Alas, things are so topsy-turvy that, instead of having to do with each individual going alone into his secret closet to commune quietly with himself, people believe that religion is a matter for very loud talk.

— Soren Kierkegaard

'The bad Infinite' vs. 'the good Infinite'

2008-06-01T18:57:00.000+10:00

The principal objection, the total objection to the natural sciences, can formally be expressed simply and definitely like this: It is unthinkable that it could occur to a human being who has reached a conclusion about himself as a spirit in relation to eternity, to choose physical science (with its empirical material) as a field for his efforts.

....That a physicist has a consciousness goes without saying, he has a consciousness within the circumscribed scope of his talent, perhaps he has amazing acumen, a gift of combination, almost a conjuror's knack for idea-associations, and so on. But at the very maximum it amounts to this: such an eminent talent, this absolutely uniquely gifted man is able to explain Nature, but does not understand his own self! He does not become transparent to himself in regard to his spiritual destiny, to the ethical guidance of his talent, etc.

But this state of affairs is nothing but scepticism, as is easily seen (for scepticism is this: that an unknown quantity, some 'X', can explain everything. But when everything is explained through an 'X' which is not explained, then in toto nothing is explained, nothing at all. If this is not scepticism, then it is superstition.)

— Soren Kierkegaard

Religion and the sexes

2008-06-01T18:51:00.000+10:00

The greatest possible misunderstanding about religious matters between one human being and another occurs when you take a man and a woman, and the man wants to teach her religion, and the whole bliss inherent therein, in this being for God, then becomes the object of her amorous love.

— Soren Kierkegaard

The ultimate extinction of the Dharma

2008-05-31T10:59:00.000+10:00

"Thus have I heard. At one time the Buddha was in the state of Kushinagara. The Tathagata was to enter Nirvana within three months and the bhikshus and Bodhisattvas as well as the great multitude of beings had come to pay homage to the Buddha and to bow in reverence. The World Honored One was tranquil and silent. He spoke not a word and his light did not appear. Worthy Ananda bowed and asked the Buddha,

'O Bhagavan, heretofore whenever you spoke the Dharma, awesome light would naturally appear. Yet today among this great assembly there is no such radiance. There must be a good cause for this and we wish to hear the Bhagavan's explanation.'

The Buddha remained silent and did not answer until the request had been repeated three times. He then told Ananda,

"After I enter Nirvana, when the Dharma is about to perish, during the Evil Age of the Five Turbidities, the way of demons will flourish. Demonic beings will become Shramanas; they will pervert and destroy my teachings. Wearing the garb of laypersons, they will prefer handsome clothes and their precept sashes will be made of multi-colored cloth. They wll use intoxicants, eat meat, kill other beings and they will indulge in their desire for flavorful food. They will lack compassion and they will bear hatred and jealousy even among themselves.

"At that time there will be Bodhisattvas, Pratyekabuddhas, and Arhats who will reverently and diligently cultivate immaculate virtue. They will be respected by all people and their teachings will be fair and egalitarian. These cultivators of the Way will take pity on the poor, they will be mindful of the aged, and they will save and give counsel to those people they find in difficult circumstances. They will at all times exhort others to worship and to protect sutras and images of the Buddha. They will do meritorious deeds, be resolute and kind and never harm others. They will forsake their bodies for others' benefit. They will hold no great regard for themselves but will be patient, yielding, humane, and peaceful.

"If such people exist, the hordes of demonic bhikshus will be jealous of them. The demons will harass them, slander and defame them, expel them from their midst and degrade them. They will ostracise the good monks from the monastic community. Thereafter these demons will not cultivate the Way-virtue. Their temples and monastic buildings will be vacant and overgrown with weeds. For want of care and maintenance their Way-places will drift into ruin and oblivion. The demonic bhikshus will only be greedy for wealth and will amass great heaps of goods. They will refuse to distribute any of it or to use it to gain blessings and virtue.

"At this time, the evil monks will buy and sell slaves to till their fields and to slash and burn the mountain forests. They will do harm to living creatures and they will feel not the least bit of compassion. These slaves will themselves become bhikshus and maidservants will become bhikshunis. Totally lacking in Way-virtue, these people will run amok, indulging in licentious behaviour. In their turbid confusion they will fail to separate the men from the women in the monastic communities. From this generation on, the Way will be weakened. Fugitives from the law will seek refuge in my Way, wishing to be Shramanas but failing to observe the moral regulations. The precepts will continue to be recited twice a month, but in name alone. Being lazy and lax, no one will want to listen any longer. These evil Shramanas will be unwilling to recite the sutras in their entirety and they will make abbreviations at the beginning and at the end of the texts as they please. Soon the practice of reciting sutras will stop altogether. Even if there are people who recite texts, they will be unlettered, unqualified people who will insist, nonetheless, that they are correct. Bumptious, arrogant, and vain, these people will seek fame and glory. They will display elegant airs in the hope of attracting offerings from other people.

"When the lives of these demonic bhikshus come to an end their essential spirits will fall into the avici hells. Having committed the five evil sins, they will suffer successive rebirths as hungry ghosts and as animals. They will know all such states of woe as they pass on through aeons as numerous as sands on the banks of the Ganges River. When their offences are accounted for they will be reborn in a border land where the Triple Jewel is unknown.

"When the Dharma is about to disappear, women will become vigorous and will at all times do deeds of virtue. Men will grow lax and will no longer speak the Dharmas. Those genuine Shramanas they see will be looked upon as dung and no one will have faith in them. When the Dharma is about to perish, all the gods will begin to weep. Rivers will dry up and the five grains will not ripen. Epidemic diseases will frequently take the lives of multitudes of people. The masses will toil and suffer while the local officials will plot and scheme. No one will adhere to principles. Instead, all people will be ever more numerous like the sands of the ocean-bed. Good persons will be hard to find; at most there will be one or two. As the aeon comes to a close, the revolution of the sun and the moon will grow short and the lifespan of people will decrease. Their hair will turn white at the age of forty years. Because of excessive licentious behaviour they will quickly exhaust their seminal fluids and will die at a young age, usually before sixty years. As the life-span of males decreases, that of females will increase to seventy, eighty, ninety, or one hundred years.

"The great rivers will rise up in disharmony with their natural cycles, yet people will not take notice or feel concern. Extremes of climate will soon be taken for granted. Beings of all races will mix together at random, without regard for the noble and the mean. They will alternately sink and float like feeding creatures.

"Then there will be Bodhisattvas, Pratyekabuddhas, and Arhats who will gather together in an unprecedented assembly because they will all have been harried and pursued by the hordes of demons. They will no longer dwell in the assemblies but the Three Vehicles will retreat to the wilderness. In a tranquil place they will find shelter, happiness, and long life. Gods will protect them and the moon will shine down upon them. The Three Vehicles will have an opportunity to meet together and the Way will flourish. However, within fifty-two years the Shurangama Sutra and the Pratyutpanna Samadhi, the Standing Buddha Samadhi, will be the first to change and then to disappear. The twelve divisions of the canon will gradually follow until they vanish completely, never to appear again. Its words and texts will be totally unknown everafter. The precept sashes of Shramanas will turn white of themselves. When my Dharma disappears it will be just like an oil lamp which flares brightly for an instant just before it goes out. So too, will the Dharma flare and die. After this time it is difficult to speak with certainty of what will follow.

"So it will remain for the next ten million years. When Maitreya is about to appear in the world to become the next Buddha, the planet will be entirely peaceful. Evil vapors will have dissipated, rain will be ample and regular, the crops will grow abundantly. Trees will grow to a great height and people will grow to be eighty feet tall. The average lifespan will extend to 84,000 years. It will be impossible to count all the beings who will be taken across to liberation."

Worthy Ananda addressed the Buddha, 'What should we call this Sutra and how shall we uphold it?'

The Buddha said, "Ananda, this sutra is called The Ultimate Extinction of the Dharma. Tell everyone to propagate it widely; the merit of your actions will be measureless, beyond reckoning."

When the four-fold assembly of disciples heard this sutra they grieved and wept. Each of them resolved to attain the true path of the Supreme Sage. Then bowing to the Buddha, they withdrew.

---The Buddha Speaks the Ultimate Extinction of the Dharma Sutra, from the Shurangama Sutra, Introduction II.

Sex and Character

2008-04-21T07:43:00.000+10:00

The feminine is unconscious, but the masculine is conscious.

The sage consciously surrenders to the truth which he is conscious of, whereas unconscious things, like the feminine, or a rock, are simply undifferentiated.

--- Kevin Solway