ESOTERIC RAGE

UPSET ABOUT GOD

2005-06-15T18:51:00.000+02:00

...and TRANSFIGURATION

Yes, it's time for revelation!

and it's going to upset you too

GO TO GOD'S PAGE
but...
I found it exhilarating!
I found it elevating!
I found it excruciating!
I FOUND IT!

GO TO THE DIVINE PAGE!

You'll like it
You'll treasure it
You'll want to be part of it!

Alfa kai Omega

DEUS
omnia per ipsum facta sunt et sine ipso factum est nihil quod factum est

LogoV

AMEN
A[l] Me[lech] N[e'eman]
Lord God King Who is Trustworthy
Signore Dio Re Fiducia e Verità
So Be It そうそれがありなさい
אמן amen آمين
Amen Cosí Sia 如此假如是
So sei es 이렇게 그것 있으십시요
Ainsi que ce soit
Seja assim ele
Tan sea
Adonoy Eloheynu Adonoy Echod
Adonai Elohaynu Adonai Echad
Baruchj Shem k'vod makchuso l'olom vo-ed
Barukh Shem k'vod malkhuto l'olam va-ed
V-ohavto es Adonoy Eloecho b-chol l'vovcho u-v-chol naf'sh'cho u-v-chol m'odecho
V-ahavta et Adonai Elohecha b-chol l'vavcha u-v-chol naf'sh'cha u-v-chol m'odecha
V-hoyu ha-d'vorim ho-ayleh asher onochi m'tzav'cho ha-yom al-l'vovecho
V-hayu ha-d'varim ha-ayleh asher anochi m'tzav'cha ha-yom al l'vavecha
Ani Adonly Elohaychem, Adonoy Elohaychem emes
Ani Adonai Elohaychem, Adonai Elohaycham emet
אמן AMEN آمين

LogoV
so many languages, so little understanding...

Other upsetting posts:

UPSET ABOUT U.G.[the non-guru]

UPSET ABOUT ENLIGHTENMENT

UPSET ABOUT MEMORIES

UPSET ABOUT THE RHYTHM OF IT ALL

UPSET ABOUT AESTHETICS

UPSET ABOUT ANGER AND RAGE

UPSET ABOUT LIFE

UPSET ABOUT HEAVEN

ON BEING UPSET

UPSET ABOUT U.G.

2005-06-14T23:08:00.000+02:00

U.G.
U.G.K.
U.G.
U.
YOU
YES, YOU!
WHO, ME?
YES, YOU
YOU
U.
U.G.
U.G.K.
U.G.
U.
YOU
YOU & I
I

I am not out to liberate anybody. You have to liberate yourself, and you are unable to do that. What I have to say will not do it. I am only interested in describing this state, in clearing away the occultation and mystification in which those people in the 'holy business' have shrouded the whole thing. Maybe I can convince you not to waste a lot of time and energy, looking for a state which does not exist except in your imagination.

Get this straight, this is your state I am describing, your natural state, not my state or the state of a God-realized man or a mutant or any such thing. This is your natural state, but what prevents what is there from expressing itself in its own way is your reaching out for something, trying to be something other than what you are.

You can never understand this; you can only experience this in terms of your past experience. This is outside the realm of experience. The natural state is acausal: it just happens. No communication is possible, and none necessary. The only thing that is real to you is the way you are functioning; it is an act of futility to relate my description to the way you are functioning. When you stop all this comparison, what is there is your natural state. Then you will not listen to anybody.

DO YOU KNOW WHO'S SAYING THIS?
DO YOU?
U.G.
THAT'S WHO

Why do I always discover light when it's starting to fade, to die out?

I'm always late
I'm always one step behind...

But before I scream my pain, let me listen to ug once more:

There is no teaching of mine, and never shall be one. "Teaching" is not the word for it. A teaching implies a method or a system, a technique or a new way of thinking to be applied in order to bring about a transformation in your way of life. What I am saying is outside the field of teachability; it is simply a description of the way I am functioning. It is just a description of the natural state of man -- this is the way you, stripped of the machinations of thought, are also functioning.

The natural state is not the state of a self-realized God-realized man, it is not a thing to be achieved or attained, it is not a thing to be willed into existence; it is there -- it is the living state. This state is just the functional activity of life. By 'life' I do not mean something abstract; it is the life of the senses, functioning naturally without the interference of thought. Thought is an interloper, which thrusts itself into the affairs of the senses. It has a profit motive: thought directs the activity of the senses to get something out of them, and uses them to give continuity to itself.

Your natural state has no relationship whatsoever with the religious states of bliss, beatitude and ecstasy; they lie within the field of experience. Those who have led man on his search for religiousness throughout the centuries have perhaps experienced those religious states. So can you. They are thought-induced states of being, and as they come, so do they go. Krishna Consciousness, Buddha Consciousness, Christ Consciousness, or what have you, are all trips in the wrong direction: they are all within the field of time. The timeless can never be experienced, can never be grasped, contained, much less given expression to, by any man. That beaten track will lead you nowhere. There is no oasis situated yonder; you are stuck with the mirage.

This state is a physical condition of your being. It is not some kind of psychological mutation. It is not a state of mind into which you can fall one day, and out of it the next day. You can't imagine the extent to which, as you are now, thought pervades and interferes with the functioning of every cell in your body. Coming into your natural state will blast every cell, every gland, every nerve. It is a chemical change. An alchemy of some sort takes place. But this state has nothing to do with the experiences of chemical drugs such as LSD. Those are experiences; this is not.

Does such a thing as enlightenment exist? To me what does exist is a purely physical process; there is nothing mystical or spiritual about it. If I close the eyes, some light penetrates through the eyelids. If I cover the eyelids, there is still light inside. There seems to be some kind of a hole in the forehead, which doesn't show, but through which something penetrates. In India that light is golden; in Europe it is blue. There is also some kind of light penetration through the back of the neck. It's as if there is a hole running through between those spots in front and back of the skull. There is nothing inside but this light. If you cover those points, there is complete, total darkness. This light doesn't do anything or help the body to function in any way; it's just there.

This state is a state of not knowing; you really don't know what you are looking at. I may look at the clock on the wall for half an hour -- still I do not read the time. I don't know it is a clock. All there is inside is wonderment: "What is this that I am looking at?" Not that the question actually phrases itself like that in words: the whole of my being is like a single, big question mark. It is a state of wonder, of wondering, because I just do not know what I am looking at. The knowledge about it -- all that I have learned -- is held in the background unless there is a demand. It is in the 'declutched state'. If you ask the time, I will say "It's a quarter past three" or whatever -- it comes quickly like an arrow -- then I am back in the state of not knowing, of wonder.

You can never understand the tremendous peace that is always there within you, that is your natural state. Your trying to create a peaceful state of mind is in fact creating disturbance within you. You can only talk of peace, create a state of mind and say to yourself that you are very peaceful -- but that is not peace; that is violence. So there is no use in practicing peace, there is no reason to practice silence. Real silence is explosive; it is not the dead state of mind that spiritual seekers think. "Oh, I am at peace with myself! There is silence, a tremendous silence! I experience silence!" -- that doesn't mean anything at all. This is volcanic in its nature: it's bubbling all the time -- the energy, the life -- that is its quality. You may ask how I know. I don't know. Life is aware of itself, if we can put it that way -- it is conscious of itself.

When I talk of 'feeling', I do not mean the same thing that you do. Actually, feeling is a physical response, a thud in the thymus. The thymus, one of the endocrine glands, is located under the breast bone. The doctors tell us that it is active through childhood until puberty and then becomes dormant. When you come into your natural state, this gland is re-activated. Sensations are felt there; you don't translate them as 'good' or 'bad'; they are just a thud. If there is a movement outside of you -- a clock pendulum swinging, or a bird flying across your field of vision -- that movement is also felt in the thymus. The whole of your being is that movement or vibrates with that sound; there is no separation. This does not mean that you identify yourself with that bird or whatever -- "I am that flying bird." There is no 'you' there, nor is there any object. What causes that sensation, you don't know. You do not even know that it is a sensation.

'Affection' (this is not my interpretation of the word) means that you are affected by everything, not that some emotion flows from you towards something. The natural state is a state of great sensitivity -- but this is a physical sensitivity of the senses, not some kind of emotional compassion or tenderness for others. There is compassion only in the sense that there are no 'others' for me, and so there is no separation.

Is there in you an entity which you call the 'I' or the 'mind' or the 'self'? Is there a co- ordinator who is co-ordinating what you are looking at with what you are listening to, what you are smelling with what you are tasting, and so on? Or is there anything which links together the various sensations originating from a single sense -- the flow of impulses from the eyes, for example? Actually, there is always a gap between any two sensations. The co-ordinator bridges that gap: he establishes himself as an illusion of continuity.

In the natural state there is no entity who is co-ordinating the messages from the different senses. Each sense is functioning independently in its own way. When there is a demand from outside which makes it necessary to co-ordinate one or two or all of the senses and come up with a response, still there is no co-ordinator, but there is a temporary state of co- ordination. There is no continuity; when the demand has been met, again there is only the unco-ordinated, disconnected, disjointed functioning of the senses. This is always the case. Once the continuity is blown apart -- not that it was ever there; but the illusory continuity -- it's finished once and for all.

Can this make any sense to you? It cannot. All that you know lies within the framework of your experience, which is of thought. This state is not an experience. I am only trying to give you a 'feel' of it, which is, unfortunately, misleading.

When there is no co-ordinator, there is no linking of sensations, there is no translating of sensations; they stay pure and simple sensations. I do not even know that they are sensations. I may look at you as you are talking. The eyes will focus on your mouth because that is what is moving, and the ears will receive the sound vibrations. There is nothing inside which links up the two and says that it is you talking. I may be looking at a spring bubbling out of the earth and hear the water, but there is nothing to say that the noise being heard is the sound of water, or that that sound is in any way connected with what I am seeing. I may be looking at my foot, but nothing says that this is my foot. When I am walking, I see my feet moving -- it is such a funny thing: "What is that which is moving?"

What functions is a primordial consciousness, untouched by thought.

The eyes are like a very sensitive camera. The physiologists say that light reflected off objects strikes the retina of the eye and the sensation goes through the optic nerve to the brain. The faculty of sight, of seeing, is simply a physical phenomenon. It makes no difference to the eyes whether they are focused on a snow-capped mountain or on a garbage can: they produce sensations in exactly the same way. the eyes look on everyone and everything without discrimination.

You have a feeling that there is a 'cameraman' who is directing the eyes. But left to themselves -- when there is no 'cameraman' -- the eyes do not linger, but are moving all the time. They are drawn by the things outside. Movement attracts them, or brightness or a color which stands out from whatever is around it. There is no 'I' looking; mountains, flowers, trees, cows, all look at me. The consciousness is like a mirror, reflecting whatever is there outside. The depth, the distance, the color, everything is there, but there is nobody who is translating these things. Unless there is a demand for knowledge about what I am looking at, there is no separation, no distance from what is there. It may not actually be possible to count the hairs on the head of someone sitting across the room, but there is a kind of clarity which seems as if I could.

The eyes do not blink, except when there is sudden danger -- this is something very natural because the things outside are demanding attention all the time. Then, when the eyes are tired, a built-in mechanism in the body cuts them out -- they may be open, but they are blurred. But if the eyes stay open all the time, if the reflex action of blinking is not operating, they become dry and you will go blind; so there are some glands beyond the outer corners of the eyes, which are not activated in your case, which act as a watering mechanism. Tears flow all the time from the outer corners. Ignorant people have described them as 'tears of joy' or 'tears of bliss'. There is nothing divine about them. By practicing not blinking, one will not arrive in this state; one will only strain the eyes. And there are neurotics in mental hospitals whose eyes do not blink for one reason or another -- for them it is a pathological condition. But once you are in your natural state, by some luck or some strange chance, all this happens in its own way.

Does beauty lie in the eye of the beholder? Does it lie in the object? Where does it lie? Beauty is thought-induced. I do not stop and write poems about the mountain in front of me. What happens is that I am walking and suddenly see something different because the light has changed. I have nothing to do with it. It is not that something new is seen, or that there is a total attention; there has been a sudden change in the light itself. There is no recognition of that as beauty. Clarity is there, which probably wasn't there before the light changed. Then this consciousness suddenly expands to the size of the object in front of the body, and the lungs take a deep breath. This is the pranayama (breath control); not what you are doing, sitting in a corner and inhaling through one nostril and exhaling through the other; this pranayama is going on all the time. So, there is consciousness of a sudden change in the breathing, and then it moves on to something else, the mooing of a cow or the howling of a jackal. It is always moving; it does not linger on something which thought has decided is beautiful. There is no one directing.

Do you listen to anybody? You do not; you listen only to yourself. When you leave the sense of hearing alone, all that is there is the vibration of the sound -- the words repeat themselves inside of you, as in an echo chamber. This sense is functioning in just the same way with you, except that you think the words you are hearing come from outside of you. Get this straight: You can never hear one word from anyone else, no matter how intimately you think you are in relationship with that person; you hear only your own translations, always. They are all your words you are hearing. All that the other person's words can possibly be to you is a noise, a vibration picked up by the ear-drum and transferred to the nerves which run to the brain. You are translating those vibrations all the time, trying to understand, because you want to get something out of what you are hearing. That is all right for a relationship with someone on the level of "Here is some money; give me a half kilo of carrots" -- but that is the limit of your relationship, of your communication, with anybody.

When there is no translation, all languages sound the same whether or not your particular knowledge structure 'speaks' a particular language. The only differences are in the spacing of the syllables and in the tune. Languages are melodic in different ways.

It is acquired taste that tells you that Beethoven's Ninth Symphony is more beautiful than a chorus of cats screaming; both produce equally valid sensations. Of course some sounds can be damaging to the body, and noise levels above a certain number of decibels are hard on the nervous system and can cause deafness -- that is not what I am talking about. But the appreciation of music, poetry and language is all culturally determined and is the product of thought.

Your movement of thought interferes with the process of touch, just as it does with the other senses. Anything you touch is always translated as 'hard', 'soft', 'warm', 'cold', 'wet', 'dry', and so on.

You do not realize it, but it is your thinking that creates your own body. Without this thought process there is no body consciousness -- which is to say there is no body at all. My body exists for other people; it does not exist for me; there are only isolated points of contact, impulses of touch which are not tied together by thought. So the body is not different from the objects around it; it is a set of sensations like any others. Your body does not belong to you.

Perhaps I can give you the 'feel' of this. I sleep four hours at night, no matter what time I go to bed. Then I lie in bed until morning fully awake. I don't know what is lying there in the bed; I don't know whether I'm lying on my left side or my right side -- for hours and hours I lie like this. If there is any noise outside -- a bird or something -- it just echoes in me. I listen to the "flub-dub-flub-dub" of my heart and don't know what it is. There is no body between the two sheets -- the form of the body is not there. If the question is asked, "What is in there?" there is only an awareness of the points of contact, where the body is in contact with the bed and the sheets, and where it is in contact with itself, at the crossing of the legs, for example. There are only the sensations of touch from these points of contact, and the rest of the body is not there. There is some kind of heaviness, probably the gravitational pull, something very vague. There is nothing inside which links up these things. Even if the eyes are open and looking at the whole body, there are still only the points of contact, and they have no connection with what I am looking at. If I want to try to link up these points of contact into the shape of my own body, probably I will succeed, but by the time it is completed the body is back in the same situation of different points of contact. The linkage cannot stay. It is the same sort of thing when I'm sitting or standing. There is no body.

Can you tell me how mango juice tastes? I can't. You also cannot; but you try to relive the memory of mango juice now -- you create for yourself some kind of an experience of how it tastes -- which I cannot do. I must have mango juice on my tongue -- seeing or smelling it is not enough -- in order to be able to bring that past knowledge into operation and to say "Yes, this is what mango juice tastes like." This does not mean that personal preferences and 'tastes' change. In a market my hand automatically reaches out for the same items that I have liked all my life. But because I cannot conjure up a mental experience, there can be no craving for foods which are not there.

Smell plays a greater part in your daily life than does taste. The olfactory organs are constantly open to odors. But if you do not interfere with the sense of smell, what is there is only an irritation in the nose. It makes no difference whether you are smelling cow dung or an expensive French perfume -- you rub the nose and move on.

My talking comes out in response to the questions which are asked. I cannot sit and give a talk on the natural state -- that is an artificial situation for me. There is nobody who is thinking thoughts and then coming out with answers. When you throw a ball at me, the ball bounces back, and that is what you call an 'answer'. But I don't give any answers; this state is expressing itself. I really don't know what I'm saying, and what I'm saying is of no importance. You may transcribe my own talking, but it will make no sense to me -- it is a dead thing.

What is here, this natural state, is a living thing. It cannot be captured by me, let alone by you. It's like a flower. (This simile is all I can give.) It just blooms. It's there. As long as it is there, it has a fragrance which is different and distinct from that of every other flower. You may not recognize it. You may or may not write odes or sonnets about it. A wandering cow might eat it, or it may be chopped down by a haycutter, or it fades and is finished -- that's the end of it. It's of no importance. You can't preserve its perfume; whatever you preserve of this is only a synthetic, a chemical perfume, not the living thing. Preserving the expressions, teachings or words of such a man has no meaning. This state has only contemporary value, contemporary expression.

The personality does not change when you come into this state. You are, after all, a computer machine, which reacts as it has been programmed. It is in fact your present effort to change yourself that is taking you away from yourself and keeping you from functioning in the natural way. The personality will remain the same. Don't expect such a man to become free from anger or idiosyncrasies. Don't expect some kind of spiritual humility. Such a man may be the most arrogant person you have ever met, because he is touching life at a unique place where no man has touched before.

It is for this reason that each person who comes into this state expresses it in a unique way, in terms relevant to his time. It is also for this reason that if two or more people are living in this state at the same time, they will never get together. They won't dance in the streets hand in hand: "We are all self-realized men! We belong!"

The natural needs of a human being are basic: food, clothing and shelter. You must either work for them or be given them by somebody. If these are your only needs, they are not very difficult to fulfill. To deny yourself the basic needs is not a sign of spirituality; but to require more than food, clothing and shelter is a neurotic state of mind.

Is not sex a basic human requirement? Sex is dependent upon thought; the body itself has no sex. Only the genitals and perhaps the hormone balances differ between male and female. It is thought that says "I am a man, and that is a woman, an attractive woman." It is thought that translates sex feelings in the body and says "These are sexual feelings." And it is thought that provides the build-up without which no sex is possible: "It would be more pleasurable to hold that woman's hand than just to look at her. It would be more pleasurable to kiss her than just to embrace her," and so on. In the natural state there is no build-up of thought. Without that build-up, sex is impossible. And sex is tremendously violent to the body. The body normally is a very peaceful organism, and then you subject it to this tremendous tension and release, which feels pleasurable to you. Actually it is painful to the body.

But through suppression or attempts at sublimation of sex you will never come into this state. As long as you think of God, you will have thoughts of sex. Ask any religious seeker you may know who practices celibacy, whether he doesn't dream of women at night. The peak of the sex experience is the one thing in life you have that comes close to being a first-hand experience; all of the rest of your experiences are second-hand, somebody else's. Why do you weave so many taboos and ideas around this? Why do you destroy the joy of sex? Not that I am advocating indulgence or promiscuity; but through abstinence and continence you will never achieve a thing.

There must be a living contact. If you walk out of the room, you disappear from my consciousness. Where you are, or why you are not here -- these questions do not arise. There are no images here -- there is no room for them -- the sensory apparatus is completely occupied with the things I am looking at now. There must be a living contact with those things that are in the room, not thoughts about things that are not here. And so, if you are totally 'tuned in' to the sensory activity, there in no room for fears about who will feed you tomorrow, or for speculation about God, Truth and Reality.

This is not a state of omniscience, wherein all of man's eternal questions are answered; rather it is a state in which the questioning has stopped. It has stopped because those questions have no relation to the way the organism is functioning, and the way the organism is functioning leaves no room for those questions.

The body has an extraordinary mechanism for renewing itself. This is necessary because the senses in the natural state are functioning at the peak of their sensitivity all the time. So, when the senses become tired, the body goes through death. This is real physical death, not some mental state. It can happen one or more times a day. You do not decide to go through this death; it descends upon you. It feels at first as if you have been given an anaesthetic: the senses become increasingly dull, the heartbeat slows, the feet and hands become ice cold, and the whole body becomes stiff like a corpse. Energy flows from all over the body towards some point. It happens differently every time. The whole process takes forty-eight or forty-nine minutes. During this time the stream of thoughts continues, but there is no reading of the thoughts. At the end of this period you 'conk out': the stream of thought is cut. There is no way of knowing how long that cut lasts -- it is not an experience. There is nothing you can say about that time of being 'conked out' -- that can never become part of your conscious existence or conscious thinking.

You don't know what brings you back from death. If you had any will at that moment, you could decide not to come back. When the 'conking out' is over, the stream of thought picks up exactly where it left off. Dullness is over; clarity is back. The body feels very stiff -- slowly it begins to move of its own accord, limbering itself up. The movements are more like the Chinese T'ai Chi than like Hatha Yoga. The disciples observed the things that were happening to the teachers, probably, and embodied them and taught hundreds of postures -- but they are all worthless; it is an extraordinary movement. Those who have observed my body moving say it looks like the motions of a newly born baby. This 'conking out' gives a total renewal of the senses, glands and nervous system: after it they function at the peak of their sensitivity.

You shall not taste of death, for there is no death for you: you cannot experience your own death. Are you born? Life and death cannot be separated; you have no chance whatever of knowing for yourself where one begins and the other ends. You can experience the death of another, but not your own. The only death is physical death; there is no psychological death.

Why are you so afraid of death?

Your experiencing structure cannot conceive of any event that it will not experience. It even expects to preside over its own dissolution, and so it wonders what death will feel like -- it tries to project the feeling of what it will be like not to feel. But in order to anticipate a future experience, your structure needs knowledge, a similar past experience it can call upon for reference. You cannot remember what it felt like not to exist before you were born, and you cannot remember your own birth, so you have no basis for projecting your future non- existence. As long as you have known life, you have known yourself, you have been there, so, to you, you have a feeling of eternity. To justify this feeling of eternity, your structure begins to convince itself that there will be a life after death for you -- heaven, reincarnation, transmigration of souls, or whatever. What is it that you think reincarnates? Where is that soul of yours? Can you taste it, touch it, show it to me? What is there inside of you that goes to heaven? What is there? There is nothing inside of you but fear.

Why do you dream? You have the feeling that there is somebody, a self, who is running the show of your perceptions, translating what is seen, heard and felt, directing the eyes, saying "This is beautiful; that is ugly. I will look at this; I will not look at that." You cannot control like that -- you think that you can; but the camera is taking pictures all the time, and the tape- recorder is recording all the time, whether you look at one thing for a longer time than you look at something else. Then, when the body is at rest or your thoughts are in a passive state, these things begin to come up -- one bit of this, one bit of that -- it creates some kind of a mosaic and you begin to dream. When that 'somebody' is not there, there is nothing which says "I was asleep, I was dreaming, and now I am awake."

What is morality? It is not the following of enjoined rules of conduct. It is not a question of standing above temptations, or of conquering hate, anger, greed, lust and violence. Questioning your actions before and after creates the moral problem. What is responsible for this situation is the faculty of distinguishing between right and wrong and influencing your actions accordingly.

Life is action. Unquestioned action is morality. Questioning your actions is destroying the expression of life. A person who lets life act in its own way without the protective movement of thought has no self to defend. What need will he have to lie or cheat or pretend or to commit any other act which his society considers immoral?

What is keeping you from being in your natural state? You are constantly moving way from yourself. You want to be happy, either permanently or at least for this moment. You are dissatisfied with your everyday experiences, and so you want some new ones. You want to perfect yourself, to change yourself. You are reaching out, trying to be something other than what you are. It is this that is taking you away from yourself.
Society has put before you the ideal of a 'perfect man'. No matter in which culture you were born, you have scriptural doctrines and traditions handed down to you to tell you how to behave. You are told that through due practice you can even eventually come into the state attained by the sages, saints and saviors of mankind. And so you try to control your behavior, to control your thoughts, to be something unnatural.

We are all living in a 'thought sphere'. Your thoughts are not your own; they belong to everybody. There are only thoughts, but you create a counter-thought, the thinker, with which you read every thought. Your effort to control life has created a secondary movement of thought within you, which you call the 'I'. This movement of thought within you is parallel to the movement of life, but isolated from it; it can never touch life. You are a living creature, yet you lead your entire life within the realm of this isolated, parallel movement of thought. You cut yourself off from life -- that is something very unnatural.

The natural state is not a 'thoughtless state' -- that is one of the greatest hoaxes perpetrated for thousands of years on poor, helpless Hindus. You will never be without thought until the body is a corpse, a very dead corpse. Being able to think is necessary to survive. But in this state thought stops choking you; it falls into its natural rhythm. There is no longer a 'you' who reads the thoughts and thinks that they are 'his'.

Have you ever looked at that parallel movement of thought? The books on English grammar will tell you that 'I' is a first person singular pronoun, subjective case; but that is not what you want to know. Can you look at that thing you call 'I'? It is very elusive. Look at it now, feel it, touch it, and tell me. How do you look at it? And what is the thing that is looking at what you call 'I'? This is the crux of the whole problem: the one that is looking at what you call 'I' is the 'I'. It is creating an illusory division of itself into subject and object, and through this division it is continuing. This is the divisive nature that is operating in you, in your consciousness. Continuity of its existence is all that interests it. As long as you want to understand that 'you' or to change that 'you' into something spiritual, into something holy, beautiful or marvelous, that 'you' will continue. If you do not want to do anything about it, it is not there, it's gone.

How do you understand this? I have for all practical purposes made a statement: "What you are looking at is not different from the one who is looking." What do you do with a statement like this? What instrument do you have at your disposal for understanding a meaningless, illogical, irrational statement? You begin to think. Through thinking, you cannot understand a thing. You are translating what I am saying, in terms of the knowledge you already have, just as you translate everything else, because you want to get something out of it. When you stop doing that, what is there is what I am describing. The absence of what you are doing -- trying to understand, or trying to change yourself -- is the state of being that I am describing.

Is there a beyond? Because you are not interested in the everyday things and the happenings around you, you have invented a thing called the 'beyond', or 'timelessness', or 'God', 'Truth', 'Reality', 'Brahman', 'enlightenment', or whatever, and you search for that. There may not be any beyond. You don't know a thing about that beyond; whatever you know is what you have been told, the knowledge you have about that. So you are projecting that knowledge. What you call 'beyond' is created by the knowledge you have about that beyond; and whatever knowledge you have about a beyond is exactly what you will experience. The knowledge creates the experience, and the experience then strengthens the knowledge.

What you know can never be the beyond. Whatever you experience is not the beyond. If there is any beyond, this movement of 'you' is absent. The absence of this movement probably is the beyond, but the beyond can never be experienced by you; it is when the 'you' is not there. Why are you trying to experience a thing that cannot be experienced?

You must always recognize what you are looking at, otherwise you are not there. The moment you translate, the 'you' is there. You look at something and recognize that it is a bag, a red bag. Thought interferes with the sensation by translating. Why does thought interfere? And can you do anything about it? The moment you look at a thing, what comes inside of you is the word 'bag', if not bag', then 'bench' or 'bannister', 'step', "that man sitting there, he has white hair." It goes on and on -- you are repeating to yourself all the time. If you don't do that, you are preoccupied with something else: "I'm getting late for the office." You are either thinking about something which is totally unrelated to the way the senses are functioning at this moment, or else you are looking and saying to yourself "That's a bag, that's a red bag," and so on and so on -- that is all that is there. The word 'bag' separates you from what you are looking at, thereby creating the 'you'; otherwise there is no space between the two.

Every time a thought is born, you are born. When the thought is gone, you are gone. But the 'you' does not let the thought go, and what gives continuity to this 'you' is the thinking. Actually there is no permanent entity in you, no totality of all your thoughts and experiences. You think that there is 'somebody' who is thinking your thoughts, 'somebody' who is feeling your feelings --- that's the illusion. I can say it is an illusion; but it is not an illusion to you.

Your emotions are more complex, but it is the same process. Why do you have to tell yourself that you are angry, that you are envious of someone else, or that sex is bothering you? I am not saying anything about fulfilling or not fulfilling. There is a sensation in you, and you say that you are depressed or unhappy or blissful, jealous, greedy, envious. This labelling brings into existence the one who is translating this sensation. What you call "I" is nothing but this word 'red bag', 'bench', 'steps', 'banister', 'light bulb', 'angry', 'blissful', 'jealous', or whatever. You are putting your brain cells to unnecessary activity making the memory cells operate all the time, destroying the energy that is there. This is only wearing you out.

This labelling is necessary when you must communicate with someone else or with yourself. But you communicate with yourself all the time. Why do you do this? The only difference between you and the person who talks aloud to himself is that you don't talk aloud. The moment you do begin to talk aloud, along comes the psychiatrist. That chap, of course, is doing the same thing that you are doing, communicating to himself all the time -- 'bag', 'red bag', 'obsessive', 'compulsive', 'Oedipus complex,' 'greedy', 'bench', 'banister', 'martini'. Then he says something is wrong with you and puts you on the couch and wants to change you, to help you.

Why can't you leave the sensations alone? Why do you translate? You do this because if you do not communicate to yourself, you are not there. The prospect of that is frightening to the 'you'.

Whatever you experience -- peace, bliss, silence, beatitude, ecstasy, joy, God knows what -- will be old, second-hand. You already have knowledge about all of these things. The fact that you are in a blissful state or in a state of tremendous silence means that you know about it. You must know a thing in order to experience it. That knowledge is nothing marvelous or metaphysical; 'bench', 'bag', 'red bag', is the knowledge. Knowledge is something which is put into you by somebody else, and he got that from somebody else; it is not yours.

Can you experience a simple thing like that bench that is sitting across from you? No, you only experience the knowledge you have about it. And the knowledge has come from some outside agency, always. You think the thoughts of your society, feel the feelings of your society and experience the experiences of your society; there is no new experience.

So, all that any man has ever thought or felt must go out of your system. And you are the product of all that knowledge -- that's all you are.

What is thought? You don't know a thing about it; all that you know about what you call 'thought' is what you have been told. How can you do anything with it -- mould it, control it, shape it or stop it? You are all the time trying to do something with it because somebody has told you that you must change this or replace that, hold on to the good thoughts and not the bad thoughts. Thoughts are thoughts; they are neither good nor bad. As long as you want to do something with whatever is there, you are thinking. Wanting and thinking are not two different things. Wanting to understand means there is a movement of thought. You are adding momentum to that movement, giving it continuity.

The senses function unnaturally in you because you want to use them to get something. Why should you get anything? Because you want what you call the 'you' to continue. You are protecting that continuity. Thought is a protective mechanism: it protects the 'you' at the expense of something or somebody else. Anything born out of thought is destructive: it will ultimately destroy you and your kind.

It is the repetitive mechanism of thought that is wearing you out. So, what is it that you can do about it? -- that's all that you can ask. That's the one and the only question, and any answer that I or anybody gives adds momentum to that movement of thought. What is it that you can do about it? Not one thing. It's too strong: it has the momentum of millions of years. You are totally helpless, and you cannot be conscious of that helplessness.

If you practice any system of mind control, automatically the 'you' is there, and through this it is continuing. Have you ever meditated, really seriously meditated? Or do you know anyone who has? Nobody does. If you seriously meditate, you'll wind up in the loony bin. Nor can you practice mindfulness trying to be aware every moment of your life. You cannot be aware; you and awareness cannot co-exist. If you could be in a state of awareness for one second by the clock, once in your life, the continuity would be snapped, the illusion of the experiencing structure, the 'you', would collapse, and everything would fall into the natural rhythm. In this state you do not know what you are looking at -- that is awareness. If you recognize what you are looking at, you are there, again experiencing the old, what you know.

What makes one person come into his natural state, and not another person, I don't know. Perhaps it's written in the cells. It is acausal. It is not an act of volition on your part; you can't bring it about. There is absolutely nothing you can do. You can distrust any man who tells you how he got into this state. One thing you can be sure of is that he cannot possibly know himself, and cannot possibly communicate it to you. There is a built-in triggering mechanism in the body. If the experiencing structure of thought happens to let go, the other thing will take over in its own way. The functioning of the body will be a totally different functioning, without the interference of thought except when it is necessary to communicate with somebody. To put it in the boxing-ring phrase, you have to "throw in the towel," be totally helpless. No one can help you, and you cannot help yourself.

This state is not in your interest. You are only interested in continuity. You want to continue, probably on a different level, and to function in a different dimension, but you want to continue somehow. You wouldn't touch this with a barge pole. This is going to liquidate what you call "you," all of you -- higher self, lower self, soul, Atman, conscious, subconscious -- all of that. You come to a point, and then you say "I need time." So sadhana (inquiry and religious endeavor) comes into the picture, and you say to yourself "Tomorrow I will understand." This structure is born of time and functions in time, but does not come to an end through time. If you don't understand now, you are not going to understand tomorrow. What is there to understand? Why do you want to understand what I am saying? You can't understand what I am saying. It is an exercise in futility on your part to try to relate the description of how I am functioning to the way you are functioning. This is a thing which I cannot communicate. Nor is any communication necessary. No dialogue is possible. When the 'you' is not there, when the question is not there, what is is understanding. You are finished. You'll walk out. You will never listen to anybody describing his state or ask any questions about understanding at all.

What you are looking for does not exist. You would rather tread an enchanted ground with beatific visions of a radical transformation of that non-existent self of yours into a state of being which is conjured up by some bewitching phrases. That takes you away from your natural state -- it is a movement away from yourself. To be yourself requires extraordinary intelligence. You are 'blessed' with that intelligence; nobody need give it to you, nobody can take it away from you. He who lets that express itself in its own way is a natural man.

UPSET ABOUT ENLIGHTENMENT

2005-06-09T15:45:00.000+02:00

There is no such thing as enlightenment.

By searching for enlightenment, you want to be free from the self, but whatever you are doing to free yourself from the self is the self.

How can I make you understand this simple thing? There is no 'how'.
If I tell you that, it will only add more momentum to that (search), strengthen that momentum. That is the question of all questions:

"How, how, how?"

The 'how' will remain as long as you think that the answers given by others or by me are the answers. "I have found the answer" -- they have found the answers for their questions. As long as you depend upon the answers of those people who you think are the ones to give you the answers to your questions, the questions will remain there permanently. They are not the answers; if they were, the questions would not be there. It has to be your answer.

And the answer must be found without any process.

Any process takes you away from the question, waters down the question. The question becomes more and more intense in its own way. You don't want anything except the answer to that question. Nothing else. Nothing interests you any more except the answer for that question. Day in and day out, all the rest of your life, that is the only question for you -- "How?"

That 'how?' is related to the answers given by others, so you have to reject all those answers. The question has to burn itself out, and the question cannot burn itself out so long as you are waiting for an answer either from within or from without. When the question burns itself out, what is there begins to express itself. It is your answer, not anybody else's answer. You don't even have to find the answer, because the answer is already there and will somehow express itself. You don't have to be a scholar, you don't have to read books, you don't have to do anything; what is there begins to express itself.

So, do you want an answer to that question that badly?

You know, even those who spent their lives standing on their heads or hanging from the trees got nowhere -- ant-hills grew around them, and they got nowhere. It is not that simple.

All questions are variations of the same question; they are not different questions.

How earnest are you? How serious are you? How badly do you want the answer to that question?

A question is born out of the answers that you already know. You want to know what my state is and make it part of knowledge, your knowledge, i.e. the tradition; but knowledge must come to an end. How can you understand this simple thing? Your wanting to know only adds momentum to your knowledge. It is not possible to know what this is, because knowledge is still there and is gathering momentum. The continuity of knowledge is all you are interested in.

Knowledge
Knowing, wanting to know, knowledge
Knowledge about life

What is life?

Nobody can say anything about life. You can give definitions, but those definitions have no meaning.

You can theorize about life, but that is a thing which is not of any value to you -- it cannot help you to understand anything.

Don't ask questions like "What is life?"

"What is life?" -- there is no answer to that question, so the question cannot stay there any longer.
You really don't know, so the question disappears.

But you don't let that happen there, because you think there must be an answer...

If you don't know the answer, you think there may be somebody in this world who can give an answer to that question.

"What is life?"-- nobody can give an answer to that question -- we really don't know. So the question cannot stay there; the question burns itself out, you see.

The question is born out of thought, so when it burns itself out, what is there is energy. There's a combustion: thought burns itself out and gives physical energy. In the same way, when the question is burnt, along with it goes the questioner also. The question and the questioner are not two different things. When the question burns itself out, what is there is energy. You can't say anything about that energy -- it is already manifesting itself, expressing itself in a boundless way; it has no limitations, no boundaries. It is not yours, not mine; it belongs to everybody. You are part of that. You are an expression of that. Just as the flower is an expression of life, you are another expression of life. What is behind all this is life.
What it is, you will never know.

You are not different from the animal -- you don't want to accept that fact. The only difference is that you think.

Thinking is there in the animal also, but it has become very complex in the case of man -- that's the difference.

Don't tell me that animals do not think; they do think. But in man it has become a very complex structure, and the problem is how to free yourself from this structure and use it only as an instrument to function in this world -- it has no other use at all -- it has only a contingent value, to communicate something, to function in the workaday world -- "Where is the railway station? Where can I get tomatoes? Where is the market?" -- that's all. Not philosophical concepts -- that has no meaning at all. Wanting anything other than the basic needs -- food, clothing and shelter -- that is where your self-deception begins, and there is no end to your self-deception there.

So all this thinking has no meaning at all; it is just wearing you out.

Thinking is unnecessary except to communicate with somebody.
Why do I have to communicate with myself all the time?
What for?

Thinking is wearing you out, and all methods that we use are adding more and more to that, unfortunately. All techniques and systems are adding to that. There is nothing you can do to end thinking.

"How not to think?" is THE question.
Do you know what that question implies?
You want some way, some method, some system, some technique -- and you still continue to think.

Thought is there when there is a demand for it. When there is no demand for it you don't know whether it is there or not. I am not concerned whether it is there or not. But when there is a need for it, when there is a demand for it, it is there to guide you and to help you communicate with someone. What decides that demand is not here; it is out there. The situation demands its use; it is not self- initiated.

We are all talking of thought.No?

Is it possible for you to look at thought? No, there is another thought which is looking -- that is the tricky part, you see - it divides itself into two -- otherwise you can't look at thought. When one thought looks at another thought, there are not two thoughts, but one thought. It gives you the impression that there are two thoughts, but actually there is only one movement. So, what creates the division? The division is created by thought -- that is the beginning of your thinking. It is a very tricky business. It is one movement, and what is looking at what you call 'thought' is all the definitions you have of thought.

"What is thought?" -- you pose that question to yourself. So, how can you look at that? The question is thought, you see. "What is thought?" -- there's no answer to that; any answer you give is only a definition. You can say "Thought is this".... (I have been saying so many things: "Thought is time; thought is space; thought is matter.") "Thought is this; thought is that" -- you know, that's all you can say.

But if you want to directly look at thought and find out for yourself, you have no way of looking at it. You have no way of finding out what thought is for yourself, because you cannot experience thought; you can experience thought only through the knowledge you have about thought. What happens when you do not accept the answers given by others? Something has got to happen to that question "What is thought?" The question burns itself out, because it has no answer except the answer we know. That question burns itself out, and what you have in place of the question is the answer, energy. This question, thought, is matter. When thought burns itself out, what is there is energy, which is the manifestation of life. In other words, 'life' and 'energy' are synonymous terms.

Where does thought come from?

Is it from inside, or outside? Where is the seat of human consciousness? So, for purposes of communication, or just to give a feel about it, I say there is a 'thought sphere'. In that 'thought sphere' we are all functioning, and each of us probably has an 'antenna', or what you call an 'aerial' or something, which is the creation of the culture into which we are born. It is that that is picking up these particular thoughts.

You have no way at all of finding out for yourself the seat of human consciousness, because it is all over, and you are not separate from that consciousness. Even with all the experiments that the brain physiologists and psychologists are doing, wasting millions and millions of dollars just to find out the seat of human consciousness, they will never be able to find it out at all. I am not making a dogmatic statement or any such thing.

We are using only a fraction of thought.

Just a fraction. For some reason or the other the culture has limited the possibility of the potential evolving into its completeness and wholeness. Somewhere along the line probably thought was necessary, but it has become the enemy of man now. It has become the enemy of man because the potential of the evolutionary process is thwarted by the culture, because the culture has created a 'perfect man', a 'religious man', a 'true gentleman', a 'true blue', and so on and so on, and that is quite the opposite of what is inherent here. That inherent quality (or whatever it is you want to call it) I call 'personality'.

I use the word 'personality' in quite a different sense from the sense in which psychologists use the word. Every human being has a unique personality of his own, which is trying to express itself. The culture has created what is called a 'normal man'. You see, character building is in the interests of the continuity of the society. The character-building mechanism has suppressed and thwarted what is there inside. It is in this sense that I use the word 'personality'. There is nobody like you anywhere in this world among the four billion people we have. Physiologically speaking, the individual is an extraordinary piece of creation by the evolutionary process, so I say that every individual is unique.

Whatever is there is trying to express itself and blossom into a human being. The human being has lost all of the animal instincts, and he has not developed the human instincts. What these people talk of -- psychic powers, clairvoyance, clairaudience -- they are all human instincts. And they are necessary because there are two things that the human organism is interested in. One: its survival at any cost. Why should it survive? I don't know; it is a foolish question to ask. That is one of the most important things: it has a survival mechanism of its own, which is quite different from the survival mechanism of the movement of thought. The second thing is: to reproduce itself. It has to reproduce. These are the two fundamental characteristics of the human organism, the living organism.

The culture has made it impossible for the personality to express itself in its own way, because the culture has different ideas. It has created a neurotic state. It has created this divisive movement of thought. This divisive movement has got to come to an end if whatever is there is to express itself and come into flower. That possibility is part of the human mechanism: it is built-in there. So, this divisive movement, this neurotic condition of man, has got to come to an end. But is there anything that we can do?

The problem is that anything you do -- any movement in any direction, on any level -- gives continuity to the structure of thought. The separation between mind and body must come to an end. Actually there is no separation. I have no objection to the word "mind," but it is not in one particular location or area; every cell in your system has a mind of its own, and its functioning or working is quite different from that of the other cells.

So, the whole chemistry of the body has to change: it has to undergo a sort of alchemy, if I may put it that way. Luckily, fortunately, there are certain areas in the human organism which are outside the control of thought. They are the glands, the so-called 'ductless glands'.

...Fortunately?

Yes,fortunately and luckily, otherwise man is finished. The day you control them, that's the end of man: he will lose everything, he will become -- he is already -- just a nut and bolt in the social structure. What little freedom he can have, what little opportunity there is for this personality to express itself, will be lost.

These glands are outside the control of thought. The Hindus call them 'chakras'. The glands are located in the exact same spots where they speculated the chakras are.

They are not in the psychic body -- there is no such thing as a psychic body or causal body -- they speculated, you see. They must have experienced what we call the 'ductless glands'. A tremendous amount of money is being spent, and a lot of research is going on, to find out why they are there, what the function of those glands is -- the pituitary gland, the pineal gland, the thymus gland and so forth. I don't want to use the word "chakras"; I would call them "ductless glands." Unless they are activated, any chance of human beings flowering into themselves is lost. I can't say there is any such thing as an evolutionary process, but there seems to be such an evolutionary process. What its nature is, what its purpose is, I do not know; but it seems to be trying to create something. Man remains incomplete, unless the whole of this human organism blooms into something, like a flower.

But I don't want to use the word 'flower', because it has mystical overtones.

Culture is part of human consciousness, so everything that man has experienced and felt before you is part of that consciousness.

But one question for which we don't have an adequate answer is "How is this transmitted from one generation to another generation?" It is really a mystery. All the experiences -- not necessarily just your experiences during your span of thirty, forty or fifty years, but the animal consciousness, the plant consciousness, the bird consciousness -- all that is part of this consciousness. (Not that there is an entity which reincarnates; there is no entity there, so the whole business of reincarnation is absurd as far as I am concerned.) That is why in your dreams you dream as if you are flying like a bird. You see, the sex fantasies man has, the animal postures, the Kama Sutra -- all that is part of that consciousness which is transmitted from generation to generation. How it is transmitted, I don't know, I can't say. But this seems to be the means. There must be some means of transmitting....

Much more than the genetic: the genetic is only part of it.

Consciousness is a very powerful factor in experiencing things, but it is not possible for anybody to find out the content of the whole thing -- it is too vast.

The very desire to understand the human being is to control him -- The day you control the endocrine glands, you will change the personality of man; you won't need any brainwashing. Brainwashing is a very elaborate process. If nature had been allowed to go on in its own way, everybody would have become a unique flower. Why should there be only roses in this world? What for? A grass flower or a dandelion flower has as much beauty, as much importance in the scheme of things. Why should there be only jasmine flowers, roses, or some other flower? So, the possibility is there of a change taking place which is sudden, not progressive. It has to happen in a very sudden and explosive way to break the whole thing.

In the individual.

This has no social content at all, it has no religious content, it has no mystical content -- it has none of those things. Maybe it affects the whole of human consciousness, but that is a speculation -- I can't say anything about it -- anything I say is in the area of speculation. But it is bound to affect -- there is only one mind, there is only one consciousness -- whatever happens here is bound to affect, but its effect will be very microscopic.

There is a constant battle going on here. The battle is between what is here trying to express itself in its own way, and the culture preventing it. Is it possible, or is there any way that you can rid yourself or free yourself from the stranglehold of this culture? Can you do it through any volition of yours? You can't do a thing through volition; it has to happen.

It is acausal.

It seems to have happened to some people during the course of history. Each one has given expression to that uniqueness in his own way, and that depends upon his background. It is an expression of that background. But if this kind of thing is to happen to any individual today.... It is bound to happen because nature, in its own way, throws out from time to time some flower, the end-product of human evolution. The end-product of human evolution cannot be used by this evolutionary process as a model to create another one. If it throws out one flower, that is it, you see; you can't preserve it. You can't preserve the perfume of that, because if you preserve it, it will stink. The evolutionary process or movement (whatever word you want to use) is not interested in using the one that it has perfected, as a model for further creation; it has a creation of its own.

The 'how' has got to go -- that is the only way. The 'how' has got to go because the 'how' implies that there is a way, that there is a method, that there is a technique, that there is something you can do to bring about this total change in your chemistry, this alchemy. But any such method defeats its purpose. When you find yourself in a situation where there is no way of finding any answer to that question, that is the moment when something can happen, that is the moment when the triggering apparatus that is there helps to trigger the whole thing. When the question "How?" freed from the desire to understand or bring about a change, remains there.... It is a thought you see, and thought is after all a vibration. It has a built-in atomic structure: there is an atom embedded in that thought. And when that thought cannot move, when it cannot make a move in any direction, then something has gone to happen to that thought.

There is only the one thought, "How?" The one question that this organism is interested in is "How to throw off the whole thraldom, the whole strangling influence of culture?" That question is the only question this organism has -- not as a word, not as a thought -- the whole human organism is that one question. I don't know whether I make myself clear. That is the one question, you see, which is throbbing, pulsating in every cell, in the very marrow of your bones, trying to free itself from this stranglehold. That is the one question, the one thought. That is the saviour. That question finds that it has no way of finding an answer, that it is impossible for that question to do anything, so it explodes. When it has no way to move, no space, the 'explosion' takes place. That 'explosion' is like a nuclear explosion. That breaks the continuity of thought.

Actually there is no continuity of thought, because thoughts are disconnected, disjointed things; but something is linking them up. What you call the 'I' or the 'self' or the 'center' is illusory. I can say it is illusory, because it the knowledge you have about the self that creates the self when you look at the self. So all the talk of 'self-knowledge' or 'self- knowing' has no meaning to me. It is within the framework of knowledge. It is playing tricks with itself.

So, this continuity comes to an end, and thought falls into its natural rhythm. Then it can't link up. The linking gets broken, and once it is broken it is finished. Then it is not once that thought explodes; every time that a thought arises, it explodes. It is like a nuclear explosion, you see, and it shatters the whole body. It is not an easy thing; it is the end of the man -- such a shattering thing that it will blast every cell, every nerve in your body. I went through terrible physical torture at that moment. Not that you experience the 'explosion'; you can't experience the 'explosion' -- but its after-effects, the 'fall-out', is the thing that changes the whole chemistry of your body. Then thought cannot link up any more: the constant demand for experiencing things comes to an end.

There is nobody who is feeling the feelings there, there is nobody who is thinking the thoughts there, there is nobody who is talking there; this is a pure and simple computer machine functioning automatically. The computer is not interested in your question, nor in my question. The computer is not interested in trying to understand how this mechanism is operating, so all those questions that we have as a result of our logical and rational thinking have no validity any more; they have lost their importance.

So, the mechanism is functioning in an automatic way, but with an extraordinary intelligence that is there. It knows what is good for it. Don't call it 'divine'; there is an extraordinary, tremendous intelligence which is guiding the mechanism of the human body, and its interest is protection. Everything it does is to protect its survival -- that's all it is interested in.

Then, the senses become very important factors: they begin to function at their peak capacity without the interference of thought except when there is a demand for thought. Here I must make one thing very clear: Thought is not self-initiated; it always comes into operation on demand. It depends upon the demands of the situation: there is a situation where thought is necessary, and so it is there; otherwise it is not there. Like that pen you are using -- you can write a beautiful piece of poetry or forge a cheque or do something with that pen -- it is there when there is a demand for it. Thought is only for the purposes of communication, otherwise it has no value at all. Then you are guided by your senses and not by your thoughts any more. So all this talk of controlling the senses is absolute rubbish. The senses have a built-in mechanism of control; it is not something to be acquired. This talk of yama, niyama, (controlling the senses), and all that, is rubbish; it has a self-controlling mechanism of its own. You can try to control, say, the sense of taste, but here, (in this state) you don't have to discipline yourself or control yourself. This physical organism, or human organism, or whatever you want to call it, is guided by sensory activity alone, and not by thinking, not by mind at all.

Perfection!

'Perfection' is a foolish thought. Speaking or playing a musical instrument can be perfected, but that's not what I mean. Through years and years of practice you want to become a perfect man, but it is not something that can be perfected. There is no guarantee, there is no answer as to why this happens. This is one thing that can't be reproduced. They have placed before us the ideal of the perfect man, and that has put the whole thing on the wrong track. The perfect man doesn't exist at all. A man in whom, or for whom, mutation has taken place is not a perfect being; he has all the idiosyncrasies, oddities, stupidities and absurdities that are not associated with the perfect man -- it has nothing to do with that at all. He doesn't become a super-duper genius -- tomorrow he is not going to invent something extraordinary and put man on every planet -- nothing of the sort! Limitation remain limitations -- this is hereditary.

Questioning my actions before and after is over for me. The moral question -- "I should have acted this way; I should not have acted that way. I should not have said this" -- none of that is there for me. I have no regrets, no apologies; whatever I am doing is automatic. In a given situation I am not capable of acting in any other way. I don't have to rationalize, think logically -- nothing -- that is the one and only action in that particular situation. Next time the action will be different. For all practical purposes it may be a similar situation to you; but it is not to me, because there is an unknown factor, a new factor, so my action will be different. You may see it as inconsistency or contradiction. I cannot act in any other way -- there's no connection between the two actions.

It is physical, not psychological -- I don't remember anything that is not happening at that particular moment -- there is no reaction, only response. But you are reacting all the time -- there is the judgement for or against: "This is right, that is wrong." The response I am talking about is the physical response to the situation. I function in the physical plane all the time. I am not thinking of anything when I see you; my eyes are focused on you. If I turn this side, you are wiped out; the door-knob is there, not you; you are finished for me, even in the mind. (There is no mind.) If necessary, it is recalled -- if you ask questions. Reaction is thinking about it: 'Right,' 'Wrong.' 'Good,' 'Evil'. Response is just looking without the intervention of thought. Response is physical; reaction is mental. You are all the time reacting; you are not physically responding to the things out there.

FEAR?

Yes, there is such a thing as physical fear -- that fear is essential for the protection of the human organism -- it is very important. The physical organism knows what to do in a particular situation, so you don't have to think about it. There is no preparation. If there is a snake, you step back. It is finished; you don't think about it. Physiological protection is all that this physical organism is interested in; nothing else.

The structure which is always thinking of every possible situation, envisaging every situation, how to be prepared to deal with each and every kind of situation that might arise during the course of your life, is a thing that has no meaning, because every situation is quite different.

Life guides you. I don't want to use the word 'life', because that mystifies the whole thing. This organism is interested in protecting itself, and it knows how to survive. When I go for a walk, I tell friends "Please, for goodness sake, look; don't think!" You don't have to think. Just use your eyes and your ears, and they will guide you.

The vision becomes extraordinarily clear, the listening mechanism becomes extremely sensitive, that is all; not clarity of thought. Now they have what they call 'sensory deprivation'. What they are trying to achieve is the opposite of this. The senses are not deprived of their activity here; they have their field-day: they go where they want, think what they want, anything that comes. Like the Ganges river water: from the banks you throw half-burnt bodies, filthy sewage water, everything that is dirty; after five minutes, crystal clear. It's like that with thought: there is no 'good' thought, no 'bad' thought, no 'sensual' thought, no 'spiritual' thought; all thoughts are the same.

You may ask "How can such a man have a sensual thought?"

There is nothing he can do to suppress that thought, or to give room for that thought to act. This is a reality, a fact. Sometimes the sensual memory of making love to my wife comes suddenly from nowhere. But when these thoughts try to take root there, everything in you tightens -- you don't have to do a thing. The thoughts cannot stay there -- there is no continuity, no build-up -- one knows what it is, and there it ends -- something else comes up. But it doesn't end there for you; you say "How can I have these sensual thoughts?" You think you are not free if you have sensual thoughts; but if you don't have them, you can be certain that you are not a living human being. Saint or sinner, he must respond to every stimulus. There is no sublimation -- all that is absolute nonsense. The saints are telling lies -- it is poppycock, rubbish -- don't believe all that. What is the point in condemning yourself, telling yourself that you are a sinner? What nonsense you are talking! You must respond -- if there is a woman, there must be a physical response to that -- otherwise you are a corpse.

But here there is no continuity, no build-up; something else comes up. Thoughts come and go; they repeat themselves -- it is fun that way. Not that I watched this as one who wanted to enjoy some fun. Most of the time you don't even know that they are there. They cannot stay there; they are moving. When you recognize there is trouble, fine, it cannot stay there for long; it is pushed out by the next thing. You don't have to do a thing; before you realize what is happening, it is gone. When you try to look at it, it is not there; what you are looking at is completely different from what was there before. They are not problems; they become problems only when you sit in one corner trying to meditate and control your thoughts. Thoughts are welling up inside of you. How can you control it? You have no control over it. It is not possible for you to control it. All this is an exercise in futility. You don't have to do a thing.

This man is not a stone; he is affected by everything that is happening there. Nor does he bother to create an armor. The religious man has built an armor around himself. Here the cumulative process has come to an end: the only action is physical action -- only on that level. The senses are running like wild horses -- there is nobody who is controlling them -- they run here, there and everywhere, as the situation demands. This action is the movement of life, the real movement of life, and it has no direction. If you accept the helplessness, the problem is solved -- that is why I say there is no freedom of action for you. It's not a fatalistic philosophy I am talking about; but preventing the past from interfering with, and coloring, the present.

By conserving sex energy, you are not going to improve yourself in any way. It is too silly and too absurd. Why have they laid so much stress on that? Abstinence, continence, celibacy, is not going to help to put you in this state, in this situation. You can have sex today, and this kind of thing can happen to you tomorrow -- and this can happen even through sex. If there is a moment there where there is nobody who is experiencing anything, that is the moment when this kind of a thing can happen. It doesn't have to be the discourse of a religious man; the falling of a leaf, the mooing of a cow, the neighing of a horse, or anything that is happening can do the trick -- because if you don't translate anything, that will take care of it.

There is no such thing as sublimation, nothing going up there; it is only going out -- but these holy men won't accept it. If they were honest enough, they would know what they are saying. So, that's what it is.

Sex is unfortunately separated from other activities.
Why? -- I have always wondered.
It is one; it can't be separated. Why have they put it on a different level? It is that that has created the problem, not only here, but in Western countries as well. Christianity also has separated them, maybe for reasons of security or property, but now we have ways of getting rid of these things -- at that time it was not so easy.

There is a beautiful term, "neurotic hiatus"

And Religion is responsible for that -- it has created that for us. The questioning of our actions is really the moral problem. We must have new moral codes of conduct -- that is necessary, otherwise we can't function. That is the trouble now. They, the West at any rate, are groping now for new codes. The old codes are all out of date, anachronistic, finished. Who cares about sex? Sex is so easy now, and everybody talks about it. One of the most epoch-making discoveries of modern times is the birth-control pill -- it has changed the whole thing.

I ask you a question: What is a normal man?
Is there one?
You have, of course, divided people, and you have certain psychological or philosophical norms....
Or a healthy man?
What is health?
I sometimes wonder who is a normal man? Not that I have a question.

What is 'normal' is set by each society. The ordinary man wants to be with others all the time, and not alone, therefore he makes certain accommodations.

Even such a man -- the 'extraordinary' man, as opposed to the 'ordinary' man -- has to live here in this society; he cannot run away and live in a cave and meditate. He is not in conflict with this society at all; he accepts the reality of the world, although it is so unreal, and functions in the world, accepting the reality accepted by everybody. It is very important: I can't sit in a cave and meditate on Brahman and say to myself "I am Brahman;" this is the only reality for such a man, and there is no other reality. The 'ultimate reality' is bosh and nonsense, it doesn't exist, it's a myth; this is the only reality. What other reality is there? As long as you are feeling the feelings of society, you are part of that society. Because you have no such thing as your own thoughts, your own experiences, or your own feelings, you can't run away from this society. You are not separate from the society; you are the society. There is no social or religious content to what I am saying.

So what is a normal man?

There is no such thing as a normal man.

When I look at the so-called insane people, I wonder whether they are insane, or those who are treating them.

We have very strange ideas in the religious field -- torture this body, sleep on nails, control, deny things -- all kinds of funny things. What for? Why deny certain things? I don't know.

Escaping?

What you do or do not do does not matter at all. Your practice of holiness, your practice of virtue -- that is socially valuable for the society, but that has nothing to do with this.

And enlightenment has absolutely nothing to do with it either.

Knowledge is not something mysterious or mystical. You know that you are happy, and you have theories about the working of the fan, the light -- this is the knowledge we are talking about. You introduce another knowledge, 'spiritual knowledge', but -- spiritual knowledge, sensual knowledge -- what is the difference? We give the names to them. Fantasies about God are acceptable, but fantasies about sex are called 'sensual', 'physical'. There is no difference between the two; one is socially acceptable, the other is not. You are limiting knowledge to a particular area of experience, so then it becomes 'sensual', and the other becomes 'spiritual'? Everything is sensual to me.

The knowledge that is essential for the living organism -- all of that is necessary. But all those speculations about God, Truth, Reality, have no meaning at all to me -- they are all cultural values; they are totally unrelated to the survival of the living organism; they are all socially, arbitrarily fixed, religious values. All our tastes are cultivated tastes. Likes and dislikes are all cultivated; there is no such thing as an absolute morality. By "morality" I mean questioning your actions before and after. It is all social. What is a good man good for in this world? He's good for the society, isn't he? For the smooth running of society, these codes are necessary. These religious people have created a policeman inside you. Certain actions are termed 'good' and certain other actions, are termed 'bad', either before or after you do them -- that hasn't helped you in any way; it is thinking that has created the problem. Man's problem is basically the moral dilemma, questioning your actions before and after -- it has become a neurological problem, not a religious problem -- the whole of your body is involved. Even God is a neurological problem: 'God' is the jumbled spelling of 'dog', but the whole of your being is reacting to the word 'God'. All your beliefs -- they are not just psychological; they are neurological.

You don't know what is good; you know only what is good for you. That's all you are interested in, that's a fact. Everything centers around that. All your art and reason centers around that. I am not being cynical. That's a fact. Nothing wrong with it. I'm not saying anything against it. The situations change, but it is that which is guiding you through all situations. I'm not saying it is wrong you see. If it is not so, something must be wrong with you. As long as you are operating in the field of what they call the 'pair of opposites', good and bad, you will always be choosy, in every situation, that is all -- you cannot help doing that.

A 'moral man' is a 'chicken'. A 'moral man' is a frightened man, a chicken-hearted man -- that is why he practices morality and sits in judgement over others. And his righteous indignation! A moral man (if there is one) will never, never talk of morality or sit in judgement on the morals of others.
Never!

Man is always selfish, and he will remain selfish as long as he practices selflessness as a virtue. I have nothing against selfish people. I don't want to talk about selflessness -- it has no basis at all. You say "I will be a selfless man tomorrow. Tomorrow I will be a marvelous man" -- but until tomorrow arrives (or the day after tomorrow, or the next life) you will remain selfish. What do you mean by 'selflessness'? You tell everybody to be selfless. What is the point? I have never said to anybody "Don't be selfish." Be selfish, stay selfish! -- that is my message. Wanting enlightenment is selfishness. The rich man's distributing charity is also selfishness: he will be remembered as a generous man; you will put up a statue of him there.

The basic pleasures you are indulging in, I am not against at all. Whatever you do, I am not against it at all. Because you think there is something more interesting than what you are doing, there is restlessness -- because you have an 'ideal way' of doing things, a 'perfect way' of doing things. Why is this going on?

At the end of your life you will tell yourself that you have wasted all your life. You are not doing anything to change; you have invented a 'next life'. Your dissatisfaction is very artificial. If you were really interested in mankind, you would really be doing something to change.

Once the question "How to live?" is dropped, living itself becomes the most important thing. You must be free from the burden of culture.

You have been told that you should practice desirelessness. You have practiced desirelessness for thirty or forty years, but still desires are there. So something must be wrong somewhere. Nothing can be wrong with desire; something must be wrong with the one who has told you to practice desirelessness. This (desire) is a reality; that (desirelessness) is false -- it is falsifying you. Desire is there. Desire as such can't be wrong, can't be false, because it is there. Anger as such can't be false, because anger is there. You are talking of some energy which those people have defined as God or God knows what. Don't you see that it is the very thinking that has turned this into a problem? Anger is energy, desire is energy -- all the energy you want is already in operation there. What the hell do you want energy for? You are destroying this energy through thinking. It is only thinking that has created the problem. Without thinking, there is no problem there. What I'm saying is that through thinking you cannot solve the problem; thinking can only create problems.

You hope that you will be able to resolve the problem of desire through thinking, because of that model of a saint who you think has controlled or eliminated desire. If that man has no desire as you imagine, he is a corpse. Don't believe that man at all! Such a man builds some organization, and lives in luxury, which you pay for. You are maintaining him. He is doing it for his livelihood. There is always a fool in the world who falls for him. Once in a while he allows you to prostrate before him. You will be surprised if you live with him. You will get the shock of your life if you see him there. That is why they are all aloof -- because they are afraid you will catch them some time or the other. The rich man is always afraid that you will touch him for money. So too the religious man - he never, never comes in contact with you. Seeing him is far more difficult than seeing the President of your country -- that is a lot easier than seeing a holy man. He is not what he says he is, not what he claims he is.

But those men who have 'made it' -- they live amongst the people -- you can see them always there.

So, then, what is the meaning, the purpose, of life?

Has anything any purpose?

Everybody talks of the meaning of life and the purpose of life -- everybody.
Answers have been given by the saviours, saints and sages of mankind -- and yet today you are still asking the same question, "Has life any purpose or meaning?" Either you are not satisfied or you are not really interested in finding out for yourself.

I submit that you are not really interested, because it's a frightening thing. It's a very frightening thing. Is there any such thing as truth? Have you ever asked that question for yourself? Has anybody told the truth?

There are so many truths.

They are all liars, fops, fakes and cheaters in the world, who claim they have searched for and told the truth! Alright, you want to find out for yourself what this truth is. Can you find out? Can you capture the truth and hold it and say "This is truth?" Whether you accept or reject, it's the same: it depends on your personal prejudices and predilections. So if you want to discover the truth for yourself, whatever it is, you are not in a position to either accept or reject. You assume that there is such a thing as truth you assume that there is such a thing as reality (ultimate or otherwise) -- it is that assumption that is creating the problem, the suffering, for you.

Look here, I want to experience God, truth, reality or what you will, so I must understand the nature of the experiencing structure inside of me before I deal with all that. I must look at the instrument I am using. You are trying to capture something that cannot be captured in terms of your experiencing structure, so this experiencing structure must not be there in order that the other thing may come in. What that is, you will never know. You will never know the truth, because it's a movement. It's a movement! You cannot capture it, you cannot contain it, you cannot express it. It's not a logically ascertained premise that we are interested in. So, it has to be your discovery. What good is my experience? We have thousands and thousands of experiences recorded -- they haven't helped you. It's the hope that keeps you going -- "If I follow this for another ten years, fifteen years, maybe one of these days I will...." because hope is the structure.

So one spends a lifetime and finally discovers that he's discovered nothing.

Nothing.
That's the discovery.
So-called self-realization is the discovery for yourself and by yourself that there is no self to discover. That will be a very shocking thing -- "Why the hell have I wasted all my life?" It's a shocking thing because it's going to destroy every nerve, every cell, even the cells in the marrow of your bones. I tell you, it's not going to be an easy thing, it's not going to be handed over to you on a gold platter. You have to become completely disillusioned, then the truth begins to express itself in its own way. I have discovered that it is useless to try to discover the truth. The search for truth is, I have discovered, absurd, because it's a thing which you cannot capture, contain, or give expression to.

What do you want?

Tell me, what is it?

You can't ask for a thing which you don't know.

If you want to experience one thing, the whole series of mysteries are there knocking on your door. That is not an experience at all. You are interested in experiencing the ultimate reality, truth, God, God knows what; but it's futile for you to attempt to experience a thing which you cannot experience. It doesn't mean that it is beyond the experiencing structure -- "It's a thing which I cannot describe, which I cannot...." -- you see, it's not all that stuff; the experiencing structure comes to an end. If you don't recognize what you are looking at -- that flower as a flower, that rose as a rose -- it means you are not there . What are you? You are nothing but a bundle of all these experiences, the knowledge you have about them.

I see, and I don't know what I'm looking at. My sensory perceptions are at their peak capacity, but still there is nothing inside of me which says "That is green. That is brown. You have white hair. You wear glasses...." The knowledge I have about things is in the background -- it is not operating. So, "Am I awake? Am I asleep?" --I have no way of knowing it for myself. That is why I say that in this consciousness there is a total absence of any division into wakeful, dreaming and deep-sleep states.

Here there is no such thing as reality any more, let alone the ultimate reality. I function in the world as if I accept the reality of everything the way you accept it. For example (I always ask this), is it possible for you to experience the three-dimensional space in which you are functioning? No. You must have knowledge -- length so many feet, width, height so many feet. How can you experience the three-dimensional space except through knowledge? So even this cannot be experienced -- let alone the fourth dimension -- we really don't know about it. So I can say that the walls don't exist for me, in the sense that there is no direct experience of the wall over there. That does not mean that I will knock myself against the wall when I move in that direction. It's like the water flowing: when there is an obstacle to the water, there is an action there -- either it overflows or it takes a diversion. And that action is possible only when the knowledge that is there in the background comes into operation -- then there is an action there. But here and now, when I begin to walk in that direction, there is no question of an obstruction or anything there.

You see, if I use the word "matter," it is not in the sense in which the scientists use the word. (Touches the carpet.) There is a contact. A clever man asks "How do you know there is a contact?" That contact is awareness, you can say. But the moment you say that it is hard, you have given solidity to it; otherwise, is it hard or is it soft? Can you experience directly? I don't know, language is the most misleading thing. If I use the word "directly," you think there is a direct way of experiencing something. So when I use the word "directly," I mean that you cannot experience anything at all. When I talk of 'vistavision,' it is not that I can experience that vistavision; what I am saying is that you cannot. Don't try to experience what I am talking about. I can't experience, you can't experience, nobody can experience. Then, why talk about it? Because you are there and I am here.

Unless you have to catch a train or something, you are living in the present moment.

But to call it 'living from moment to moment' is very misleading. That moment to moment living can never be captured by you -- that can never become part of your conscious existence, much less your conscious thinking.

There is no present to the structure of the 'you'; all that is there is the past, which is trying to project itself into the future. You can think about past, present, and future, but there is no future, there is no present; there is only the past. Your future is only a projection of the past. If there is a present, that present can never be experienced by you, because you experience only your knowledge about the present, and that knowledge is the past. So what is the point in trying to experience that moment which you call 'now'? The now can never be experienced by you; whatever you experience is not the now. So the now is a thing which can never become part of your conscious existence, and which you cannot give expression to. The now does not exist, as far as you are concerned, except as a concept. I don't talk about the now.

How can you expect to experience a thing that is beyond, if you can't experience a simple thing like that bench there, which you have handled and used all your life. Even a simple thing like that bench, you can't experience. What you experience is only the knowledge you have about it, and the knowledge has come from some outside agency always -- it is somebody else's; it is not yours. If you experience somebody else's experience, it is not yours. Somebody else will come along and take it away: a more persuasive man comes along and says "That's not the way to experience; there's another way," and so on and so on.

As I see it, there is no preparation for it, no meditation. You can stand on your head for forty years; nothing is going to happen; probably you will experience what you can experience, anything you want. Thought is something extraordinary: you can create something, a solid object, and put it out there, touch it, feel it, experience it and talk to it -- you think it is something extraordinary. You have to go through all these experiences.

Sometimes, out of nowhere, something like an experience too extraordinary to have happened to you or anybody ever before is there. But that did not come out of nowhere; it is part of the knowledge of consciousness. All that man has experienced before you is part of consciousness -- it is all there -- all that is a contamination. Anything you experience, however profound it may be, is a contamination; it has nothing to do with this state; somebody has experienced that before. Anything you experience there is a worthless thing; it is not that.

Whatever is experienced is thought-induced. Without knowledge you can't experience. And experience strengthens the knowledge. It is a vicious circle: the dog chasing its own tail.

Expansion of consciousness is nothing, but you give so much importance to that. Drugs will make it a lot easier than all these meditations and yogas. And look where drugs lead you...

You are in the presence of a huge mountain.
Suddenly the consciousness expands to the size of the mountain, literally.
There is a sudden blow-up of consciousness, and this sudden expansion releases tremendous energy there inside of you.
What is the effect of that on the physical body?
The physical body responds to what you call the 'sudden expansion of consciousness'. The only way the physical body can respond to that sudden expansion of consciousness is by taking a sudden breath -- suddenly you take a breath, and the whole breathing pattern changes -- so that is why you have that expression 'a breath-taking view'.
You experience such things all the time. There is nothing to these experiences.

None of these experiences means anything, whether you are 'this side' or 'that side'.

Actually there is no 'this side' or 'that side', because there is no line of demarcation here. The realization dawns on you that those experiences, however profound they may be, aren't worth anything, that's all. You may be in a blissful state -- even after that 'calamity' you have blissful states, ecstatic states, a sudden melting away of everything that is there -- it doesn't mean anything. You experience, I experience -- what is the difference?

Drugs only produce experiences, and what I am talking about is not an experience. Drug experiences are ordinary experiences.

All those religious experiences are no different from the experiences people have when they take drugs. I know a boy who had never heard of the Tibetan literature, but when he was 'on a trip', he experienced all kinds of mandalas. He started talking about them, and he met one Tibetan chap who described them to him. How is that kind of thing possible? You don't have to be in Tibet; no matter where you are, you see, all that is part of consciousness. Even Donald Duck and the Simpsons have become part of the human consciousness.

You cannot experience anything which you can call your own. Whatever you experience, however profound that experience may be, is the result of the knowledge that is part of your consciousness. Somebody must have, somewhere along the line, experienced the bliss, beatitude -- call it 'ecstasy', call it by whatever name you like, but somebody somewhere along the line -- not necessarily you -- must have experienced that, and that experience is part of your consciousness. you have to come to a point where there is no such thing as a new experience at all: somebody has experienced it before, so it is not yours.

The saint or mystic is a second-hand man who experiences what the sages have talked about, so he is still in the field of duality, whereas the sages or seers are functioning in the undivided state of consciousness. The mystic experience is an extraordinary one because it is not an intellectual experience; it helps them to look at things differently, to feel differently, to experience things differently and to interpret the statements of the sages and seers for others.

The world should be grateful to the saints rather than to the sages. Had it not been for the saints, the sages would have been clean forgotten long ago. The sages don't depend upon any authority; what they say is the authority. This the sages talked about, and the saints -- some of them -- had experiences, and this became a part of their experience. They tried to share that (experience) through music and all kinds of things. But this is not an experience which can be shared with somebody else; this is not an experience at all.

The saints are trying to tell you, so they are always in the field of duality; whereas the sage or seer, or whatever you want to call him, is in the state of undivided consciousness. He does not know that he is a free man, so for him there is no question of trying to free others. He is just there, he talks about it, and then he goes. Great teachers never use any authority, and they do not interpret the saints. The saints help you to look at things differently, to interpret things differently.

You cannot become a sage through any spiritual practice; it is not in you hands. A sage cannot have a disciple, a sage cannot have a follower, because it is not an experience that can be shared. (Even an ordinary experience, you can't share with others. Can you tell somebody who has never experienced sex what the sex experience is like?) The sages and seers are original and unique because they have freed themselves from the entire past. (Even the mystic experience is part of the past) Not that the past goes for such a man; but for him the past has no emotional content -- it is not continually operative, coloring the actions.

This is the ultimate: You have to totally surrender yourself. There is no path of wisdom; there is no path at all. It is total surrender -- throwing in the towel, throwing in the sponge -- and what comes out of that is wisdom.

It is not surrender in the ordinary sense of the word; it means there isn't anything you can do. That is total surrender -- total helplessness. It can't be brought about through any effort or volition of yours. If you want to surrender to something, it's only to get something. That's why I use the words 'a state of total surrender'. It's a state of surrender where all effort has come to an end, where all movement in the direction of getting something has come to an end. All wanting, be it this wanting or that wanting, is totally absent.

But, first of all, there's no hunger. A hungry man will do anything and everything to satisfy his hunger, and then he will discover that there is nothing he can do to satisfy it. Even the hope must go that some miracle will happen and it will descend upon you from somewhere. If there is nothing you can do to satisfy your hunger, something will happen. All those to whom this kind of thing has happened have really worked hard, touched rock-bottom, staked everything. It does not come easily. It is not handed over to you on a gold platter by somebody.

It is a very simple thing -- so simple that the complex structure does not want to leave it alone. But at the same time I ask "Is there anything that you can do?" Nobody can create the hunger. I always give the simile of the rice husk: when once it is lighted, it goes on burning, burning, burning, till the whole thing is burnt up. It is a thing which you cannot artificially create. You will probably be inspired or hypnotized by some kind of go-getter or hypnotist -- there are so many.

There is no such thing as experience here. You seem to know. You imagine. Imagination must come to an end. I don't know how to put it. The absence of imagination, the absence of will, the absence of effort, the absence of all movement in any direction, on any level, in any dimension -- that is the thing. That is a thing that cannot be experienced at all -- it is not an experience. You are interested in experiencing bliss, beatitude, love, God knows what, but that is a worthless thing. If I experience bliss, is that bliss? It is created by the knowledge I have. It is the knowledge. To be free from knowledge is not an easy thing. You are that knowledge -- not only the knowledge that you have acquired in this life, but the knowledge of millions and millions of years, everybody's experiences. People have some experiences, you see, and on that they build a tremendous superstructure.

The ultimate reality is fearlessness?
Fearlessness is not freedom from all the phobias.
The phobias are essential for the survival of the organism. You must have the fear of heights and the fear of depths -- if that is not there, there is a danger of your falling. But you do not want to teach courage to man to fight on the battlefield. Why do you want to teach him courage? To kill others and get killed himself -- that is your culture. Crossing the Atlantic in a balloon or the Pacific on a raft -- anybody can do that -- that is not courage. Fearlessness is not a silly thing like that.

Courage is to brush aside everything that man has experienced and felt before you. You are the only one, greater than all those things. Everything is finished, the whole tradition is finished, however sacred and holy it may be -- then only can you be yourself -- that is individuality. For the first time you become an individual. As long as you depend upon somebody, some authority, you are not an individual. Individual uniqueness cannot express itself as long as there is dependence. You don't have to depend upon any authority; it has an authority of its own. You will never interpret anything, you will never rely on any authority, and yet you won't call yourself 'unique'.

The problem is that even if such a person doesn't talk, his very presence becomes a model for somebody. The fact that somebody sits here from morning till evening -- what can I do about it? Sometimes they go into trances -- they say "How can you deny what is happening to me?" and I say "You may do what you like." How can I convince you that I have nothing more than you have? I don't have anything that you don't have. Your wanting something from somebody is the cause of your misery. The end of illusion is the end of you. So you can't be without illusion; you can only replace one illusion with another illusion.

Whatever you want, you can get -- whatever you want -- whatever experience you want, you can experience. If you don't know, there is always somebody to help you -- somewhere -- you have to find out. Anything you want, you can experience. But whatever you experience is worthless - it is not it -- because this is a thing which cannot be experienced; it is not an experience.

Enlightenment (if there is any such thing as enlightenment) is not an experience at all. So, this dawns on you -- this realization (if you want to put it that way) that there is nothing to realize. Self- knowledge, or self-realization is to realize for yourself and by yourself that there is no self to realize -- that is going to be a shattering blow.

Unless you are 'there', you can't understand the meaninglessness of this (search) at all. When you are 'there', you see that the very search is the self, the very thing you want to be free from. There is no 'you' independent of the search -- that you don't understand. It is the goal that you have set before yourself that has created the 'you'. If the goal goes, if you brush aside the goal, you replace one with another. You can't be without illusion; you replace one illusion with another. If illusion goes, you go.

If you accept the goal, it is all right with me, but I say that the goal itself is false. You say that is what you want to achieve, so all this search is necessary. I maintain that there is nothing to be achieved, nothing to be accomplished, nothing to be attained, so all that you are doing to achieve your goal is meaningless. I didn't understand that when I was doing all that search. The earlier it dawns on you, the better for you. If those things produce some experiences, it will be very difficult for you to transcend your own experience. Somewhere along the line it is bound to dawn on you -- you know it is not taking you anywhere.

But the hope keeps you going -- the hope that one day through the same thing you will probably reach your goal -- because that instrument (i.e. thought) is born out of time, is born out of cause and effect, and it cannot conceive of anything except in terms of time. So if time is not there, there is nothing to happen -- let alone in the future -- because it is time that has created the need for the timeless. 'Time' means the 'future'. If this time is cut off, it is not as if what you expect to happen will happen now. There is nothing to happen here. Time burns itself out when the timeless is knocked off.

Whatever you want to happen is in terms of time. Assuming for a moment that you are already in the blissful state, you don't want to be in that state tomorrow. Whatever the state you want to be in, you are not in that state, because the goal is there, which is tomorrow, not today. So if this (goal) is not there, the thought which is thinking in terms of something happening in time is not there. Unfortunately, there is nothing to happen. Happening is in time. When time is not there, there is no happening, nothing to happen there. Achieving is in time, so it is bound to be caught up in cause and effect. You want to produce a result, but this is not a result, not a happening, not an achievement.

Anything you do with this will cause you pain -- There's no end to that -- you will keep searching for this eternally -- you are not going to get it. Even if you get what you want, and experience bliss, beatitude, God knows what, there is always more and more of it. Silence you experience, but you want permanent silence, you want always to be in silence. But in the very nature of things, there is no permanence at all. You have never lived with these (liberated) people.

It's a very simple thing. It's so simple that the complex structure does not want to leave it alone. There's nothing that you can do, of course; you are condemned.

You are condemned.

Should you practice meditation?

Nope

No

Nothing -- no meditations -- nothing.

What is there to meditate upon?

Meditation is a self-centered activity. It is strengthening the very self you want to be free from. What are you meditating for? You want to be free from something. What are you to meditate on? All right, thought is a noise, sound. What is sound? You look at this and you say "This is a tape-recorder," so thought is sound. There is a continuous flow of thoughts, and you are linking up all these thoughts all the time, and this is the noise you can't stand. Why can't you stand that noise? So, by repeating mantras, you create a louder noise, and you submerge the noise of thought, and then you are at peace with yourself. You think that something marvelous is happening to you. But all meditation is a self- centered activity.

There is a constant demand on your part to experience everything that you look at, everything that you are feeling inside. Constantly, because if you don't do that, you are coming to an end -- 'you' as you know yourself, 'you' as you experience yourself, are coming to an end -- and you do not want that to come to an end; you want the continuity. So all spiritual pursuits are in the direction of strengthening that continuity. It's a self-centered activity. Through self-centered activity, how can you be free from the activities of the self? (I use the word 'self' in quotation marks.) So all your experiences, all your meditations, all your sadhana, all that you do is a self-centered activity -- it is strengthening the self, it is adding momentum, gathering momentum, so it is taking you in the opposite direction. Whatever you do to be free from the self also is a self-centered activity. You can't divide these things into two; the process you adopt to reach what you call 'being' is also a becoming process. I don't know if I make myself clear. So there is no such thing as being and becoming. You are always in the becoming process, no matter what you call it. If you want to be yourself and not somebody else, that also is a becoming process. There is nothing to do about this. Anything you do to put yourself in that state of being is a becoming process...

Life is one unitary movement, not two different movements. It's moving, it's a continuous flux, but you cannot look at that flux and say "That is a flux." Then why do I say this is a flux? It is only to give you a feel about it that I use those words. But if you translate these words in terms of your concepts and abstractions, you are lost. Really, you do not know a thing about what is being said, you don't understand at all -- so, if you realize that, what happens? Then there is no movement of thought there. (Wanting to understand means there is a movement of thought.) You really don't know a thing about what this chap is saying. Then, what happens inside of you is only that you repeat these phrases, phrase by phrase, word by word, without translating them, without interpreting them in terms of your concepts -- his talking is just a noise; you are an echo chamber there -- that's all that happens. You are not there. (When the 'you' is there, you are translating.) This is just a pure and simple physiological functioning of the organism. Because there is life, there is a response. The response and the stimulus are not two different movements: you cannot separate the response from the stimulus. (The moment you separate the response from the stimulus, there is a division, it is a divisive consciousness that is in operation.) So, it is one movement.

Thought and life are one interfluent movement. But there seems to be a movement of thought, parallel to the movement of life going on in you all the time. There seems to be; otherwise there would be no need for us to sit and talk about this -- listening to me, or trying to understand me, would not be there. If there were no continuity of thought in you, this situation which we have created for ourselves in this room wouldn't exist any more. You would 't want to listen to any chap describing how he is functioning -- why should you? If he is functioning that way, all right, jolly good. Why are you interested in that? Why do you establish any relationship?

As long as you listen to me, you are lost. You listen to me because you want to understand what I am talking about. Not that it is something abstract or difficult; but your understanding is through that instrument (the thinking mechanism), and that is not the instrument (to understand this). The refined, sensitized instrument, you call 'intuition', but there is no other instrument. If that is not the instrument and there is no other instrument, the logical conclusion from that statement is: Is there anything to understand? There is nothing to understand. If that understanding is there somehow....

That understanding is here somehow. I don't know how it came -- that is why I cannot take you there -- it has no cause. You are interested in finding out the cause because you want it to happen in you; otherwise you would not be interested in the cause.

So it is not a question of understanding me; it is not possible to understand me. It is just not possible to understand. The only thing you can understand is within that framework and in relation to that reference point. You think that the more you listen, the more these things become clear to you; but the clarity of thought is making it more difficult for you to understand what I am talking about. So you come back year after year, and you think things are becoming clearer and clearer for you; but actually it is destroying the possibility of understanding anything.

There is nothing to understand -- that understanding somehow is there, and how it came about nobody knows, and there is no way at all of making you see this, and you ask "Why do you talk?" You come here.

As long as you think that you can see more and more clearly, I say you have seen nothing. If you say you have seen, you have not seen, because seeing is the end of the structure that says that. There is no seeing you can know. In other words, there is no seeing. As long as you think you can understand this more, see the world around you more clearly, I say you will see nothing and understand nothing.

What I am saying has no logic. If it has a logic, it has a logic of its own -- I don't know anything about it. But you have necessarily to fit me into the logical structure of your thought; otherwise the logical structure there, the rational thing, comes to an end. You see, you have to rationalize -- that is what you are. But this has nothing to do with rationality, it has nothing to do with your logic -- that doesn't mean that it is illogical or irrational.

What do you want to understand?

There is nothing to understand -- that is the understanding I am talking about. If you understand what it is all about, what I am talking about, you are already there. It will be something new, something totally new. You will give expression to it in a completely different way. How will it express itself, I don't know, you don't know, nobody knows. If others fit me into their frameworks, it is their business; we do not have any vested interest in that.

You can't be other than what you are. Whatever you are trying to do to change, you will not succeed. Stop running away from yourself! What is the good of my saying so? There is no use my telling you that, because you are not going to stop it. I am telling you to stop it. You are not certain of it: "Maybe there is something that can be done." I am certain that you have no freedom of action. In that sense I go a step further and say that you are genetically controlled. Naturally you will say that that statement is a theory. You have a hope that you can do something. There are many people in the 'holy business' who assure you that you can do something, so you will go there -- as simple as that. My certainty remains. You call it a 'theory.' All right, you can go and try your luck. In the end you will find out for yourself and by yourself "That fellow is right!" I'll sing my song and go.

On my side it is very clear. There are so many people who have said they can help you -- you would do well to go there and try your luck. But I want to add this statutory warning (like the one you have on the cigarette packs): You are not going to get anything from anybody, because there is nothing to get. That is why I say that since there is no such thing as enlightenment, the question whether X or Y is enlightened or not does not at all arise. You are all like-minded people who are after such things, that is all. That is your projection, your ideation about those people, that is all that I am saying. There may not be anything there other than what you have projected on them.

I am not interested in changing the society. What I am saying has absolutely no social content at all. What is wrong with this world? Why do you want to change the world? This is an extraordinarily beautiful world! You want to change this world so that you can live in a world of your own ideas. The real problem is that you want to change yourself, and you find it's impossible, and so you want to change the world so that you can fit the world into your own pattern.

More blood has been shed in the name of the man who talked about loving thy neighbor as thyself, than in all the recent wars put together. Do you call that 'social content'? They are all fighting, quarrelling. How can there be any social content? You want to be a good man, a nice man, an innocent man and all that stuff; you want to be something different -- always tomorrow or the day after -- but even then you will say exactly the same thing -- the next life. That is what all the teachers promise you (and they just promise you) -- next life. Till then he is in business, he is assured. If he says there is nothing, you leave him. That is why I do not have to bother: you are going to leave in any case, because what brings you here will certainly take you somewhere else. You are interested in getting something. You are not going to get it. There is some kind of a false hope or promise. I don't give false hopes or promises. But they have created some hope, so you go on and on and on -- like riding a tiger, you can't get off.

There's no journey. Both are kidding themselves -- those who take or pretend to take you on the journey, and those who are trying. You can't walk with me. How can you walk with me? You are so frightened of the thorns there, the stones, you want a trained guide. I myself don't know the terrain. Have you never heard of the proverb that warns you never to walk with a man who has sandals, because he always walks on thorns? You will get into trouble. I myself do not know the terrain; I am just going.

You can talk of so many things -- home truths, "Be good. Be wise." But this has no social content at all: this cannot be used to change the world, reform the world, create a new man, a new world -- all that is balderdash. Maybe some people do it just to help some people -- that's all right -- do something -- if it works, it works. But to suggest something like that, knowing very well that it is not going to work, is not right --"Let's give them some new toys to play with. All the traditional things have failed, so here are some new toys, specially imported from Japan" (or God knows where). What are you doing? You are not doing anything; you are repeating new phrases, new words, new idioms -- that is all you are doing.

You don't accept the fact that all that is a contamination there in that consciousness. Whatever you consider sacred, whatever you consider extraordinary -- Buddha Consciousness, Christ Consciousness, Krishna Consciousness -- is a contamination in that consciousness. It has to purify itself: all that, all that dross -- all that is holy, all that is sacred -- must go. When that has gone, you are yourself. Otherwise there is dependence: you experience something extraordinary there and start an organization. These organizations collect twenty million dollars and publish books so that they can transmit, make others experience, those silly things.

If I stop seeking, a change will take place in me?

Oh yes, it will.
And when I've said "Yes, it will," then what?
What good is my assurance to you? It is not good at all -- it is utterly worthless -- so you don't listen to me or anybody. Listening to other people is what you've been doing all your life -- it's the cause of your unhappiness. You are unique. There is no reason for your wanting to be like another chap. You can't be like him, anyway. This wanting -- wanting to listen, wanting to understand, wanting to be like such-and-such an individual -- has come about because society is interested in creating a perfect man; but there is no such thing as a perfect man -- this is our problem. All we can do is be ourselves, and no one can help you be that. He can teach you how to ski or fix a motor car, but he cannot teach you anything important.

Not even Buddha or Christ?

Why bother about those fellows? They are dead. Pitch them in the river!
And yet you don't; you keep listening to someone (it makes no difference whom), and you keep hoping that somehow, tomorrow or the next day, by listening more and more, you will get off the merry-go- round. You listen to your parents and to your teachers at school, and they tell you to be good and dutiful and not be angry and so on, and that doesn't do any good, and so you go and learn how to do Yoga, and then presently some old chap comes along and tells you to be choicelessly aware. Or maybe you find someone in the 'holy business', and he does miracles -- he produces some trinkets out of the air, and you fall for it -- or perhaps he touches you, and you see some blue light or green light or yellow light or God knows what, and you hope he will help you experience enlightenment. But he cannot help you. It is not something that can be captured, contained or given expression to. I do not know if you see the utter helplessness of the situation, and how, if anyone thinks he can help you, he will inevitably mislead you, and the less phoney he is, the more powerful he is, the more enlightened he is, the more misery and mischief he will create for you.

Any interest in the question of reincarnation?

What about the question "Are you born?" Can you tell me? You yourself -- can you be sure that you are born? Can you experience your own birth?
You cannot.
You can experience the births of others and the deaths of others, and you think that some day you will experience your own death. But there is no guarantee you will experience your own death. Your structure which is interested in understanding your own death and your own birth won't be there. So life as such has no beginning and no end; it is a beginningless and endless movement, and you are only an expression of it. You are only an expression of life, like a bird or a worm or a cloud.

But with the singular difference that you are conscious of myself, and the worm is not.

You are conscious of yourself through thought (by which I mean not just conscious thought, but that conditioning which transforms the life that passes through you into feelings, into pleasure and pain). And this thought is not yours; it is what you have learned from others, it is second-hand, it belongs to everybody. You belong to everybody. So why don't you accept the natural thing? If you accept the natural thing, all falls into its own rhythm: there is nothing to do, there is nothing to control, there is nothing to ask. You don't have to do a thing. You are finished.

How can you unburden yourself of the past? You see, the language.... The word 'unburden' implies there is something that you can do to unburden yourself. There is nothing you can do to free yourself from the past. This is only a description of the state where the past does not operate anymore -- it cannot influence your actions. Those actions -- they are not your actions anymore. You don't know anything about that action -- it is a thing that cannot be manipulated by you at all, the action of life itself. At the same time I want to point out that it is not a mystical or religious thing or a pure, spontaneous action; it has nothing to do with that. Life is acting all the time, in the sense that as long as sensory activity is in operation something is happening. Not one, but millions and millions of sensations are hitting the human organism. This human organism is not separate from that; it is one electromagnetic field. It is one field, and what isolates and separates you and creates a tiny electromagnetic field is thought.

Can one uncondition one's thought through being aware of it?

How do you see the thought? Have you really tried this, or have you just accepted the idea? The one who is looking at conditioned thought is also conditioned, so do you see the absurdity of doing this? I don't think so. You can't do a thing. Don't get on this journey of freeing yourself from the conditioning of your own thought.

But you are still trying. You accept these ideas; you never question the validity of those statements. It doesn't matter who says it, it is false for you. Not only that, it is falsifying you because you do not test the validity of those statements for yourself.

The conditioning, you see -- you will never be free from that. Don't believe anybody. There is no such thing as an unconditioned mind; the mind is conditioned. It is absurd, you see, to.... If there is a mind, it is bound to be conditioned. There is no such thing as an open mind. Mind can never be open; it is a closed thing. I don't accept that there is such a thing as the mind, let alone the open mind or the unconditioned mind. There is no totality of these thoughts and experiences; they are all disconnected, disjointed things.

The thoughtless state, silence.... How can you experience silence? -- that's my question. How can you experience the thoughtless state? You'll never be free from thought. If there is any such thing as a thoughtless state, it can never be experienced by you or by anybody. Whatever you experience there is created by this thought.

The timeless.... We used to write essays, "Time and the Timeless," [scroll back and see...] ridiculous stuff. It is time that creates the timeless and then pursues the timeless -- and through this pursuit time is continuing -- continuity is all that it is interested in.

Abstractions are very misleading. If you start talking in terms of 'innocence', in terms of this, that and the other, you are lost. Abstractions are very misleading, very misleading. You talk of innocence. What do you know about that innocence? In that state you really don't know what you are looking at. You don't know that you are looking at your wife. Can there be any relationship? Can there be a wife? Can there be children? You see, you can talk of innocence, but when there is no mind, why talk of the innocent mind? Where is the mind, or the unconditioned mind? These phrases are very misleading; they are not going to help in any way.

The very nature of mind (if there is a mind) is neurotic, because it wants two things at the same time, so every individual is a neurotic individual. As long as you want two things, you are in a state of neurosis. And when you can't get it, you become psychotic, you become wild. Not that you necessarily go and beat somebody; but you are destroying yourself, because the violence is there inside of you.

What makes you unhappy is the search for a thing that does not exist.

Happiness does not exist at all. Similarly, there is no such thing as enlightenment. You may say that every teacher and all the saints and saviours of mankind have been asserting for centuries upon centuries that there is enlightenment and that they are enlightened. Throw them all in one bunch into the river! I don't care. To realize that there is no enlightenment at all is enlightenment.

Thought doesn't stop. Thoughts will always be there, because thought and life are not two different things. Don't imagine that you will be free of thoughts; thoughts may be there or not, but you don't identify yourself with the thoughts at all -- there is nothing here to identify itself with a particular movement of thought. They may be there or they may not be there -- they are going to be there because life and thought are not two different things -- you cannot do a thing about it. When you see that this instrument is not the thing to use to understand anything, then it somehow slows down and falls into its natural rhythm, then it does not become a problem or a burden to you.

You are trying to understand the teaching of somebody through this instrument which is a product of this thinking. You do not, while you are listening to somebody, understand that you are using a wrong instrument. Through this, you cannot understand what somebody is saying -- that is the first thing you must understand. Whatever you are doing is a barrier to whatever you want to get, it doesn't matter what you want to get. You see, whatever you are doing is adding fuel, adding momentum to that. So, how is that going to slow down or stop, and when are you going to do that? Tomorrow or the day after? You say "Tomorrow I will understand." There is no tomorrow: this is not going to happen tomorrow; it must happen now or never. So, "I am determined to see what prevents me from understanding what I want to understand." What prevents you from understanding what you want to understand is this very thing which you are using to understand things. This is not my teaching or anybody's teaching, but this is the only thing: You are trying to understand something through an instrument which is not the instrument to understand.

So, the only thing that keeps you trying is the hope -- "If I discuss this matter with this guy tomorrow, probably I'll be able to understand" -- but that is not the way. If I don't understand, I don't understand: "I don't know, I don't seem to have any way of resolving this problem." They have given the example of a dog chasing its own tail -- it goes on and on and on, and you feel you are getting somewhere. This is the unfortunate situation: you are not getting anywhere; that is not the way at all. Then what is the way? There is no way. Anything I say, you turn into a way and add to the momentum. That is not the way, that is not the path, it has to be yours. So all paths must go. As long as you follow somebody else's path, the path is the product of thought, so it is actually not a new path; it's the same old path, and you are playing the same old game in a new way. It is not a new game; it is the same old game that you are playing all the time, but you think you are playing a new game. When you see the absurdity of what you are doing, maybe you'll realize "What the hell have I been doing for thirty years, forty years, fifty years!"

Do I need twenty years to look at that mountain? I don't need twenty years. I don't know how to look at it. (Somebody is explaining a natural state of his being which is yours, not mine.) What happens when you are in front of the thing that you call a 'mountain', you don't know. (I am describing that state, what actually happens -- that is the action I am talking about.) That acts on you. How that action takes place inside of you, and what happens when it acts on you, is a thing you'll never understand. You have to live through this in order to understand what I'm saying. If you had lived through that, you wouldn't be here and you wouldn't ask all these questions. Either you look at it now, or never. And what keeps you trying is the hope "Maybe next moment I'll be able to understand." You are trying to focus your eyes on what you are looking at and see something more with more clarity than you saw yesterday. So, all the tricks you are playing -- that if you look more carefully, with total attention, there is more clarity in what you are looking at -- all this is only deception, because all you are doing is clarifying your thinking; you are not looking at anything. You can't look at anything that way; it doesn't take time. So, "What am I to do with this?" Somebody says "Look at a flower," so you look at every line, every petal, the color, the depth and so on and so on. If that is not the way, what is the way, and when are you going to look at it that way?` You must come to a point where you say "I simply can't look at it the way that chap is describing. Really, I don't know. Really, I don't seem to be able to look at it any way other than the way I am looking at it" -- first you must come to that point. That means that what the other fellow says must go -- all he's told you about how to look at the flower must go -- then you can deal with the way you are looking at the flower. Then you are stuck with it: you really don't know what to do about this at all. you have to come to a point where you can't do anything at all: "This is an impossible task!" You must first deal with this, rather than with what you want to be.

'A perception without the perceiver' -- it's a concept, so the only thing that you can do is think about it: "What does this mean -- 'a perception without the perceiver'"? Or `seeing without the seer'.... I do not use those words. I say there is no translator who is translating the sensations; they stay pure and simple sensations; there is not even the knowledge that they are sensations. Seeing, tasting, touching, smelling, hearing -- these are all the sensations -- these five senses are functioning. What happens when these sensations remain as sensations without the translating, you will never know. You are translating all these sensations. So, "How to stop doing it"? You are lost if you ask "How am I going to stop the translation?" You can't stop the translation; you are the product of translation. There may not be any stoppage. If somebody says there is a stoppage, "To hell with what he is saying. This guy is either a cuckoo or some far out, freaked out ape. He is talking about things that are not real to me." You don't have the courage. You don't want to accept the reality of yourself. What I am saying is something totally unrelated to the way you are functioning. Tomorrow, you say, you want to look at things the way I say I'm looking at them. Maybe I'm deceiving myself. So, "This is the way I'm looking at it. This seems to be the only thing I know; I do not know the perceptions of that guy." So leave that guy alone -- it's no use blaming that man or anybody. Nor is there any point in blaming yourself. What is the good of blaming yourself? This is the way you are functioning. So then naturally it has to stop --not stop; it has to slow down. You don't know. You come to a point where you don't know what to do about the whole business: "I can't do anything. This is the only way I know; I don't know any other way; what the other chap says makes no sense to me". So, he says "Give it a try," and you give it a try, but you don't seem to get anywhere. So, the hope keeps you going -- "Tomorrow maybe I'll be able to understand what that chap says, maybe I'll succeed in doing what he wants me to do: -- but you will spend the rest of your life trying to understand. But if you see the futility of it all, maybe it will stop -- not really stop, but slow down.

Those who go to listen to spiritual discourses, those who read books of a religious nature and those who are looking beyond for something are like the monkeys who sit around red ocher, trying to warm themselves. You know what red ocher is -- it's red in color, but there's no warmth. There isn't anything you can get from any spiritual discourses or from any religious book. There is nothing to accomplish, nothing to attain. So what's this hullabaloo about? What is it that you want? What is it that you are searching for? -- this is my question. If you are searching for anything, and you want anything, the first thing you must do is throw away, lock, stock and barrel, hook, line and sinker, all this stuff that you are hanging on to. You must knock the whole lot into the cocked hat, otherwise there is no chance for you to be yourself. If you follow any path, it doesn't matter what that path is, it is always leading you astray, it is putting you on the wrong path. If you make anything out of what I am saying you are lost, body and soul, and if there is a God, he must, out of his sheer mercy, save you all and save you from me. What is it that you want to liberate yourself from? You are trying to ask for a thing that you have. You're on the wrong track then.

What is the right track?

What am I to do?

Are you ready to accept the fact that you are on the wrong track? That means that the teacher you are running after and the stuff you are thinking about -- that's the very thing that must go. Are you ready to throw it out of the window? Hm? You have a hope that one day that's going to lead you where you want to get to -- that's the problem, you know. Your teacher must go, it doesn't matter who the teacher is. The very thing that you are reading -- that's the very thing you must be free from.

You see, a path means that you are trying to arrive at a destination. The word 'path' is a mystical word. What is the path you are following? Somebody is telling you "This is the way. You must free yourself from the conditioning. That is the path," for example. But it is always misleading you; it is not leading you anywhere. You are moving away from yourself: you have to be yourself, and his path is trying to turn you into something other than yourself. Why do you want to be somebody other than yourself?

If you don't want to go anywhere, where is the need for you to look for a path?

Is this beautiful or is this beautiful?

Amen

UPSET ABOUT MEMORIES

2005-06-08T13:35:00.000+02:00

Memorieeeeeees… how does the song go?

Memory and forgetting are constructs, or things that we have constructed.
We have not constructed them physically; rather, we have done so conceptually.
So, no one has ever seen, heard, or felt memory or forgetting. They have no physical reality; rather we assume they exist from their properties.

It is easier to imagine memory and forgetting as processes rather than as things.

We measure memory in the process of retrieving items from storage.

We know little still about the physiological mechanisms of memory or the parts of the brain involved.

Recall is when we attempt to retrieve items from memory with a minimum of retrieval cues. For example, I might ask you to list the nations belonging to the U.N.O. Most people will have trouble mentioning more than half of them. Another example would be a question such as, "Who is generally considered to be the first psychologist?" Or, a more difficult question would be, "Who was his most famous student?"

Free recall is when retrieval cues are minimal, as above.

Cued recall is when hints, or additional retrieval cues are given.
For example, the first psychologist's name starts with a "W." Generally, we recall fewer items than we recognize.

Recognition is when we are asked to remember whether or not a certain item is the correct one.

Finally, relearning is a task that involves learning an item, forgetting it, and then learning that same item again. Relearning is not used much to study learning because people do not completely forget items.

How could I forget?

Now, then, don't you forget what follows: this piece is THE real trip...

Oh, mama, this IS GOOD!!!

Reeeeally GOOD!

Like a lightning hitting me, a jolt of lightning hitting me

... and you don't know what you are left with.
You have no way of finding out for yourself and by yourself what has happened to you.

Has anything happened to me at all?

But one thing I can say with certainty is that the very thing that I searched for all my life has been shattered to pieces.

The goals that I have set for myself -- self-realization, God-realization, transformation, radical or otherwise, or even enlightenment -- are all false, and there is nothing there to be realized, and nothing to be found there.

The very demand to be free from anything, even from the physical needs of the body, just disappeared, and I am left with nothing. Therefore, whatever comes out of me now depends upon what you draw out of me.

Hey, can you tell me where all this babbling comes from? It's splendid, it's magnificent, it's -it's -it's...UNREAL!

I have actually and factually nothing to communicate, because there is no communication possible at any level.

Where are my dear memories? Uh??

The only instrument we have is the intellect. We know, in a way, that this instrument has not helped us to understand anything. So, when once it dawns on me that this is not the instrument, and that there is no other instrument with which to understand anything, I am left with this puzzling situation that there is nothing to understand.

Should I try to tell people that I have something to say, that I have come into something extraordinary which nobody has come into?

I am left with is something extraordinary -- extraordinary not in the sense that it has been possible for me through any effort or volition of mine, but in the sense that everything that every man thought, felt, and experienced before is thrown out of my system. So, you can say that it is, indeed, a courageous thing that has happened to me. But I cannot tell people that through courage you can put yourself into that kind of situation.

Do you get where I am coming from? Who's my inspiration here? Come on, come on - my mind is plagiarised, I'm receiving vibrations...

It is all acausal.

What the hell have I been doing all my life?

Why the hell am I writing all this now?

Whatever has happened to me has happened.

There are many people who talk of rebirthing.
It has become fashionable for people to indulge in that kind of fantasy.
In Japan they have some techniques in which by manipulating certain nerves at the base of your head they will make you go through the experience of your own birth.

Is that bullshit or is that bullshit?

The experiencing structure is totally absent at the time of our birth.
Birth is a traumatic experience?
No, it is NOT.

I don't think that it is a traumatic experience at all, because there is no experiencing structure there at all. Actually it is very difficult to say as to when the experiencing structure in babies comes into operation.

The experiencing structure is genetic in its origin and in its expression. Everything is genetically controlled. If we really want to change individuals, the only way we can do it is not by changing the environment, not through changing the cultural input, but by trying to understand what really is the part that genes play in us. Maybe through some kind of genetic engineering we can create perfect human beings.

But it is a very dangerous thing that we are indulging in. When, once we perfect these engineering techniques, we will hand them over to the state. Thereafter it will be a lot easier for the state to manipulate individuals and turn them into mere robots.

The state will make people do things which they are unwilling to do. Usually it takes a lot of time and a lot of brainwashing to teach something to people -- to make people believe in God, to make people believe in a particular political ideology. Conversely, to free them from some kind of belief we have to brainwash them all over again. It is a very elaborate and long process. But it is a lot easier and faster for us to use these techniques of genetic engineering to change individuals than it is possible otherwise.

Do robots have memories?

Memory

We have been using our memory a lot. The brain plays a very minor role in the functioning of the body. It is not a creator at all. It is just a reactor. What this memory is we really don't know yet. One of these days the experts who are dealing with this problem of memory will have to come out with answers to questions like what the neurons are.

Memory is not located in any particular area of the body. Every cell in our body is involved. And my feeling is that we have come to a point in the history of mankind where we have to confront the problem of people who have lost their memories. We have put memory and our brain to such use for which they are not intended. This is one of the reasons why we find that Alzheimer's disease, or whatever you want to call it, is on the increase.

Ahaa, the misuse of the brain!

Misusing memory.
Using memory for purposes for which it is not intended.
After all, what are you? You are a memory.
We have to use memory in order to survive in the world crated by our society, culture, or whatever you want to call it. There is no other way. I know that it is an extension of the same survival mechanism.
No doubt it is.

When you burn your finger, do you withdraw it at once? Or do you wait a bit?

At once, automatically.
There you don't have to use your memory. That is the way this human body is functioning. But to survive in this world which we have created, our world of culture, society, or whatever you want to call it, the constant use of memory is essential. The whole of our education is built on the foundation of how to develop our memory.

Unfortunately, humanity has placed before itself the model of a perfect man. The idea of the perfect man is born out of the value system that we have created. That value system is born out of the behaviour patterns of the great teachers of mankind.

Jesus might be an example....

Jesus, Buddha and all the great teachers.

Every human body, however, is unique. Nature is not interested in creating a perfect being. Its interest is to create only a perfect species.

And if every one of us is unique, that implies that our code of enlightenment, if there is such a thing, would also be unique so that each of us reaches that state individually and uniquely.

It is just not possible for us to produce enlightened people on an assembly line.

If you look at history, humanity has produced only a very few enlightened people. You can count them on your fingers. But unfortunately, in the market place, we have many claimants who say that they are enlightened, and they are in turn out to enlighten everybody.

There is a market for that kind of thing.
The demand and supply principle is responsible for that. But actually an enlightened man or a free man, if there is one, is not interested in freeing or enlightening anybody. This is because he has no way of knowing that he is a free man, that he is an enlightened man. It is not something that can be shared with somebody, because it is not in the area of experience at all.

There is no such thing as a new experience. Suppose you go to a new place. What goes on in your mind is that you are always trying to fit whatever you are seeing into the framework of the past. The moment you say that something is new, it is the old that is telling you that it is new. So, it is very difficult for us to experience anything new because, if there is something really new, it is not in particular frames that the old is destroyed, but the totality of the past is destroyed in one great big blow.

We cannot experience anything new.

There is no such thing as a new experience.
There is nothing new at all.
It is the old that tells us that it is new, and through this gimmick thought is making what it calls new part of the old, and is thus maintaining its continuity. So, whatever you cannot experience does not exist. It may sound as a very dogmatic assertion, but when you try to experience something that you have not experienced before, the whole movement of the experiencing structure comes to an end.

Amen

UPSET ABOUT THE RHYTHM OF IT ALL

2005-06-08T13:13:00.000+02:00

or... a memorable epistolary

THE EXCHANGE IS IN CHRONOLOGICAL ORDER, EARLIEST DATE HERE FIRST - THEN SCROLL DOWN...

~ [the full original correspondence in on my other blog, in the reverse date sequence. It's an electronic conversation that took place in mid-2003 between an artist and yours truly.]

I wish to republish this, just so that I can enjoy it more and remember how beautifully the Mind works - whatever UG may say...

This is my existential outburst, my reaching out, my life's rhythm!

Life, all life, not only the air breathing, blood pumping, food consuming life we know but all life, animate and inanimate, is rhythm. Rhythm has no control over life but rather is what is needed to give life life. From the birth of a star to the birth of a baby, to the death of both, everything moves with and because of rhythm. Finding one thing that exists which does so without some part of it touching or applying to rhythm would be harder than floating a Styrofoam boat on a pool of gasoline.

That rhythm exists is known though not thought about daily.

Empirically one knows that everything is where it is and why it is because of rhythm.

Our letters, the correspondence I exchanged with the artist (Kal) has rhythm.
The rhythm of confidence, intimacy, anxiety and poetry… so very much poetry!

In writing and re-reading the exchange, I feel the rhythm again, the rhythm that is constantly around us, as we communicate through our minds the emotions pervading us.

Now, in republishing this excange, I am more aware of it. I am with it.

Everything needs rhythm and of everything we humans need it most.
Everything is where and what it is because of rhythm. We humans are the only creatures that can add questions and understanding to rhythm. There is a rhythm that permeates all we do, from sleeping to going to the grocery to dying. We may, at some brief moments be out of tune with rhythm, but it is still why we are.

These letters are an expression of rhythm, when rhythm was needed and questioned.

When we move with rhythm and perhaps feel it brush gently against us there is harmony within us, within our lives.

We feel a worth in and of being. Without being cognizant of the rhythm we know we simply feel good.

In this state rain, lightening and even thunder possess an awe-inspiring beauty.

I felt good when I wrote what I wrote to Kal — I'm sure he felt the same when he responded. And what we produced I believe has an awe-inspiring beauty.

When, for some reason, the rhythm of our living is upset then discord ensues and even sunlight can be frightening. When this state exists we long for and even seek rhythm. We wish to simply feel good again.

That's why we wrote…

Rocks, wind, water and anything else that is non-living exists in and are because of rhythm. All living things except for the human also exist within rhythm but also use it to pro-create. We humans do as the above-mentioned do and we also seek the harmony of that rhythm in order to feel good. To us rhythm is pleasure and it is this pleasure we seek.

We sought pleasure in writing.

We are also the only animal that creates a rhythm of our own inside the larger rhythm of life. Tens, perhaps hundreds of thousands of years ago humans, or those who would eventually become humans, discovered that rhythm can get a point across or tell a story. Perhaps it was as simple as a throated grunt or the clinking two stones together. Perhaps it was in the way one walked, much as the honeybee tells where the best pollen is by its movement in the hive. Eventually the rhythm of communication of humans lead from beating on a hallow log through vocalization to the written word.

It is at this point that the rhythm of my thoughts has come to the reason for my reproducing this correspondence.

Its lyrical grunting.

Its tense rhythm. Its power to invade the soul and touch the heart.
Like poetry.
Yeah!

The true poet listens to and expresses the rhythms of life more acutely than anyone.
Feeling this rhythm is what gives us the ability to write poetry.
Knowing that it exists in all things gives us the ability to understand a poem.
Please, remember this when you read our writing.

We were poets then, we are poets now:

Understand the rhythm...!

From: Kal
Sent: Tue 17 June 2003, 2.22
To: Kinkazzo
Subject: Re: Hi Wildbaby, still around eh?

Kink, master of ecstasy

Why write me? Change of heart?

I see you have visited my old website. Since we have met, I have done stranger art forms and am having a blast. I am saving this new collection for later presentation, so they are not quite released yet in public.

Why are you talking politics to me? You don't know me! While the Middle East fiasco was going on, I was visiting Italy, Peru, Japan and Korea. I am into archeology and temples these days. It seems we shall always have some kind of Mussolini and Bushes in every era. I would like to be apolitical somehow.

Now I am doing murals for a new ocean liner. Would keep me studio bound for a long while.

I hope you shall make fewer rude assumptions of me. It was one of the reasons I cut you off. You don't know me. Inspired by fruit??? How you make my eyes roll!

Hope this finds you well and happy in spite of me. I am fine, believe me.

Ciao!
Kal

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

From: Kinkazzo
Sent: Tue 17 June 2003, 10.30
To: Kal
Subject: RE: Hi pal, still around eh?

Change of heart? Never. My heart is set on people who have a soul and shine through the universe: you shine, I love you.

And you "cut me off", did you? My, my, what a sensitive personality: can't stand a pain in the butt, uh?
No, you're right, I don't know you, but I make assumptions given certain signs. You gave me a few in the past: I have a good memory. And yes, I'm well and happy, sharing with you a deep interest for archaeology and the temples of wisdom: well, you know that I'm smack in the middle of 3 thousand years of important history, and Italy is the cradle of arts, so....
Christ, you passed through Italy and you didn't say hello???? I'll never forgive you. We could have had a nice cappuccino with cornetto along the Tiber. Pity indeed: you lost your chance to meet a genius in his ambience ---> in a few months I'm moving to Scotland and the Goidelic culture, my friend. It should be a challenge for my humanist synapses.

Did I offend you about the fruit? Aha hahah hah! I was just going by the images on your website. Good of you to qualify it as "your old website": I wouldn't want you to lose your artistic originality for edible commercial subjects. Funny you saying "You don't know me" twice. Got really upset, you susceptible you!
Recently met with Umberto Eco and Elie Wiesel (for a series of Talmudic lectures in the Bologna Alma Mater), discussing the role of time in artistic creation: you'd be interested, for sure.

Both in the creator and the spectator, art is the attempt to transcend time.

Whatever else it may be and intend, an artefact is always a nexus of human feelings about time; and it is no coincidence that our current preoccupation with art comes at the same time as our new realization of the shortness of our duration in infinity.
Art best conquers time, and therefore nothingness. It constitutes that timeless world of the full intellect where each artefact is contemporary, and as nearly immortal as an object in a cosmos without immortality can be.

Time, the length of survival of an artefact, becomes a factor in its beauty. The aesthetic value of the object becomes confused with its value as witness, or carrier of information from far places. Its beauty merges into its usefulness as a piece of human communication; and this will plainly vary according to our need of (previous lack of) communication from the particular source.

That's possibly why your interest in archaelogy...

The logia of arches = the words from the past. A message for inspiration, a legacy for timelessness.

The older an artefact the nearer it is to the timeless; the newer the artefact the further away. Because it is new, yearless, it has none of the beauty or utility of having survived in time; but it may have the beauty or utility of being likely to survive time.

The parallel with man: we also pass like fireworks, like flowers, like fine food, fruit (!) and wine. We feel a kinship with these ephemeral arts, these manifestations of human skill that are born after and die before us; that may be come and gone in a few seconds. Unrecorded performances in music, on stage and on the sports field fall into the same category.

So there are two kinds of artefact: those we admire, and perhaps envy, because they survive us and those we like, and perhaps pity, because they do not. Both kinds are aspects of feeling about time.
So, there you are, I'm done.

And I wish you a timeless survival.

Au revoir, friend
K

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

From: Kinkazzo
Sent: Tue 17 June 2003, 11.56
To: Kal
Subject: Hey, wait a minute...! Baha'i?????????????

Goodgod!!! What a shift, from Avatar to Baha'i!!! Did you at least go to Israel to visit your "temple"? I visited the remains of mine, the Kotel...

Baha'i Artist Kal (wow, classifying yourself like that! tsk tsk)

Such a difference, such a diversity of inspiration! Bear with me for a moment: let's look at the two creations of the two different moments of your "creative" life:::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::

--This mediocre commonplace prayer [my comments in Italics]:

THIS IS FAITH
To walk where there is no path
To breathe where there is no air
To see where there is not light-
This is Faith.---------------------------------well, it's mainly a lack of everything!

To cry out in the silence,
The silence of the night,
And hearing no echo believe
And believe again and again-
This is Faith.----------------------------------this must've attracted you, given the silence.

To hold pebbles and see jewels
To raise sticks and see forests
To smile with weeping eyes-
This is Faith.----------------------------------sticks and pebbles have always been painfully useless, but smiling with weeping eyes is a depressing oxymoron.

To say: "God, I believe" when others deny,
"I hear" when there is no answer,
"I see" though naught is seen-
This is Faith.----------------------------------so, it's mainly total silence all over again.

And the fierce love in the heart,
The savage love that cries
Hidden Thou art yet there !
Veil Thy face and mute Thy tongue
yet I see and hear Thee, Love,
Beat me down to the bare earth,
Yet I rise and love Thee, Love !"
This is Faith.----------------------------------the premises do not fulfil this fierce conclusion: and, moreover, from nothing (i.e., hidden faces, mute tongues, blind eyes, bare earth, beatings, et al.) comes a big fat nothing.

a poem by Amatu'l-Baha Ruhiyyih Khanum (he should stick to his own language, and then keep it mute! Osho did much better. Hmmm, you were right: I always have an impelling urge to criticize --- it is mainly for the pursuit of excellence, I think --- I hate mediocrity: still, what can I really do about it?)

...and (remember?) your own lyricism: how much more potent! :::::::::::::::::::.:::

How would God have ecstasy...
He perhaps created mirrors...us...
for intensification...
so many of us...
brilliant idea

Could be simple like this...
the ecstasy of an astronaut in a ticker tape storm
of accolades of a homewelcoming parade
or even better, being out there in the peaceful stillness
of space for an endless moment?
Which one is it? And why did he want to come home?

Could be simple like this...
I wave at someone...
Someone smiles and likes me...
Waves back even heartier in recognition and appreciation...
We finally grab each other, pick each other up, and hug...
On other days...
I am a pest, everyone resents me, then I become scarce,
then everyone misses me, I like that...
How manipulative of me...

Love me,
Fight me,
Reach me, or
Leave me!
But it is
Love all
Over again.

Or if I blew a kiss at every atom particle in the universe...
And they all at once blew me a big kiss and embrace in return?
Is this possible?
I think so...
Because we are connected
Yet so immersed in ourselves for so long...
A forgotten sorrow...

You can create ecstasy for a moment...
You can create many ecstasies for many moments...
And they don't all have to be returned all at once.
I would love that.
They would love that.
It would prolong it...
It would make each day different...

Alone
Together
Alone
In pulsations...
Like a melody.

I tried it and felt it.
I shouldn't perceive them as far away
I should perceive them as within my being.
I wouldn't have to shout
And I can be deaf too.

I think we can extend from static to stars and back
With as simple a tool as awareness.
The more focused and sweeping the bigger the effect.

When a Messiah is born,
All the atoms rejoice.
A Messiah knows how.
We know how.
Are we doing it?

Any message to
any atom
any cell
any being
can be in the form of
Beauty..
Art....
Care...
Desire...
Need...
or Love.

Fame is but a plagiarism of Love.
A mask at the Carnevale di Venezia!
The party is over
Do you remember whom?

ecstasy starts with you
in locating those you loved
all veils removed
stars seeking stars

Say hello from Earth to everyone for me.
I mean everyOne.
Deliver it well and
With lots of love.

Remember those you loved!
In all Eternity!
They are waiting...

Or perhaps already calling...

Echos of ecstasy linger...
in every atom
in every cell
in every Being

...BRAVOOOO!

We should really write a book together!
(I've written a couple recently, but they wouldn't interest you: on linguistics....)

Adieu, mon ami
K

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

From: Kal
Sent: Tue 17 June 2003, 14.11
To: Kinkazzo
Subject: Re: Hey, wait a minute...! Baha'i?????????????

Again,
you make assumptions!!! I went from Bahai in 1986 to Avatar in 2000. And today, my writing would be different. That is old art on the Faith page painted in 1989. Can you just let it go and let people evolve and stray off the straight and narrow to explore what might work for them? You have kids, and I am sure you have courageously allowed them to "experiment" in life?
I have never been to Haifa to visit the temple.

Do you anticipate trouble ahead for me or what? Can you just sit back and leave your critic shoes at the door awhile. Since I have known you, you have been nothing but critical. Do you want me to be a friend? I don't know.... are you fun to be around? If I was in Italy again (I was there in September , Firenze and Rome), would a stopover in Bologna be warmly kissed and hugs and merry comapany with you at all? Or would you be too busy analyzing me? I don't know....I just want to have fun and explore a mix of everything. I may be willing to experience an hour of your criticism at the most, for you seem ready to take me apart limb by limb mentally. It is my choice.

If I went to the temple in Haifa, so what? it is still earth. It is a beautiful garden for meditation as well. No rituals or anything. Just a peaceful place.

But I went to Japan instead because I had a strong liking for old Japan stuff, the old craftsmanship, the way the temples were built lovingly and with thought. If you don't like Japan stuff, don't go there, but how you assume that I go to temples to worship. If I do, so what, it won't rock your world.

Or is this just you, a cosmic clown, jestering? if so, you have my respects, I am not stopping you. That is what you remind me of, by the use of your capital letters. As if to draw attention to you. Clowns jump up and down to get noticed. They use stronger makeup to get spotlit. You use strong words of pull and push for effect, to gain unforgettable attention. In my mind, I am still impressed by you, even if you don't pull with those strong critical words. Your words don't seem critical to you, unless you run a video of yourself and play back while you are alone and quieted down. It is your choice really. I don't think you know the effect of your words upon others and eventually yourself. You have me walking away or failing to stop over in Bologna, because I have never been convinced you like me at all. That is what happened. Some tweaking could be done on your part, huh? You are writing me emails now, what is cooking? you run out of "apparent opponents" or what? Did you kill all your friendships?

I don't want to place you on the defensive, but these are your effects being returned to you. I am saying NO THANK YOU. Try something else. If you want my friendship. Maybe I am not your type. Admit it then.
Something is troubling you, because you don't necessarily restrain your thoughts or think before you talk to me, how I may react to your words.
It is up to you. You want me in your space, then something may have to change.

Again, you assume I wouldn't like your writings. Maybe if your writings were written in a moment of grace or beauty as opposed to moments of discontent, I may respond to it. Even if it were a mix of both discontent and grace, I would respond to it. I don't respond to most of your words directed toward me, they show you don't approve of my momentary choices or shifts or plain natural expression. You are plain critical of me. Always! You attack and you praise in one letter, I don't care for either. You could apply silence, recognition and acceptance of me. You could love me, but have you experienced intense love with anyone? If so, I would love for you to share stories on those relationships with me, and skip the parts how you parted with them. I like to accentuate mostly on the positive. My body prefers it. I have been in the jungle a long time, so have you. I want a meeting ground where you and I reallly love each other.

Instead of saying, O GOD! What a shift from Avatar to Bahai, can you say, "Oh, God, I love you Kal!"

Kal

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

From: Kal
Sent: Tue 17 June 2003, 14.49
To: Kinky
Subject: Re: Hey, wait a minute..

Kink,

You and I are both beings of great passion. That is what we have in common. Yet you and I are under very different circumstances, probably by many lifetimes and cultures and lovers. I suspect and FEEL you lost much, got torn from those you loved and a house of books burning down couldn't compare with your cosmic grief. Nothing makes you happy because your loved ones are perceived by your eyes as far away perhaps. This is one of the sad things of "seeing through the flesh medium". We will
never be happy in the flesh, instead, having never met in person, we both perhaps can understand our intense love and admiration as souls across the Atlantic for each other. I think so. That is proof that I feel you. You sound like a widower, and nothing could make you happy.
You are bitter. Don't get defensive, I have had those feelings in past as well. We can take the crest and troughs of the tsunamis as that was our creation anyway. We survive everything. Gracefully? I don't know, but I can forgive anything. Spirits always like to explore pain to an extent, for that is the adventure of learning and experiencing anyway.
Let's say, I am timed in such a way that I did not care to share suffering when I had just come out of a long suffering. I was on a break, and therefore did not take to your style of criticism and hard labor at the time. I really don't care to be guided by anyone right now.
I am in a totally different phase right now and it is not necessarily aligned with your current phase. So, there may be a chance for two people to embrace. Some time.

But turn around abit, your lover may be right there, be at peace, Love is there. Your discontent may be so unbearable to me, because it seems a lie or not match my sensibilities of the current moment. All I would have to do is tap on your shoulder perhaps, and say, look over your shoulder, right behind you, your beloved was there all along. Not in the flesh always. But give it a chance, lifetimes or continents may
separate, but cannot succeed in absolute parting. Please be happy now.
And your lover will put an arm around you. Or it is there and you just have to feel it when you forget for a moment your numbness. I wish I could make all your sorrows go away, but challenge of the spirit can be a good thing. We take what we want to handle at the given moment out of pure choice. I am somewhat glad you remembered me by. We will have a chance. But boy, that passion of yours, given any moment of misalignment by chance any day could really hurt anyone like me, for that is the very nature of two passions in play. We could have some very high moments together, but I would suspect some alternating moments of fury and that is the natural consequence of things unless we are both abit more quiet and at peace. Heh?

I may have been a friend of yours countless of times in eternity. For how else would I not find you on this big planet so easily. Not by chance at all. The internet has shortcut it. Old cosmic friends should not take the internet for granted, for continents used to really divide peoples for lifetimes! Our vibrations' resonance has captured each other if but for a moment....

Kal

PS I had capuccino in Boboli and stayed with a young American girl in Poppi I had a relationship with. I will however still grab a chance at meeting you and embracing you. Then was not the time. Your guts were in so much unrest then, at least I feel it. When you criticize, your flesh feels it too, til it is so numbed from stiking so many blows. Can you let up for a while? I want to meet you while you are in peace. It makes it easier to hug you. There will be a time. Take your time. I think we knew each others before, because it is so easy to feel you. I love your passion. That alone inspires me. It is just laced with anger and frustration, and to me that is not an acceptable excuse, but I will be understanding. I had to walk away awhile. Yet, you got me writing you back. Not all is lost.

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

From: Kinkajoule
Sent: Wed 18 June 2003, 11.49
To: Kal
Subject: RE: Hey, wait a minute...

You are so very right, my friend. On all counts: that's why I love you, as I always expressed to you openly in the past and as a premise to my last message. That's the fundamental basis of my approach to you. It is dramatic for me to find a spirit like yours and not link it to mine: that's why the reprise, after two years. No matter what, while wandering the aether, we are destined to attract each other time and again.

Well, yeah Kal, my life has always been a drastic turmoil, comparable to the creation of the Universe... in miniature. Among other matters, my 26yrs son has gone through deep psychotic crises, had to be "hospitalized" and bombarded with chemical psycho stuff: now he's better, but not what you may call a 'normal' human being. The pain in me has been intolerable (I will not mention his), mainly because of the immense love I feel for him: when he touches my hand to seek my help, I am transfixed by a thousand lances and die a thousand deaths.

And so forth... My 18yrs old daughter is the sun of my heart, that rises every morning to illuminate my life; and yet, she paints the darkness that is her only idea of light. So much love, so little happiness.

I still remember what you told me about your wife. I'm lucky in that regard: for once, I was able to attract and not destroy. But barely. My wife is part of myself, and cannot be distinguished: she was created to love and complete me; without her I would not exist. I love her in turn, my love being defined by it; but always concentrate on my egotistic self, and in doing so I disperse the vital energy of all: you're right about friendship too. When people "discover" me because of my forceful expressiveness, they run to me like moths to light, and they all die horribly, with their inner wings destroyed...

I am intolerant, insufferable, impulsive, insensitive to other's feelings. But I am made constantly aware of the otherness of things. They are all in some sense my counterpoles. A Sartrean existentialist would say that they hedge me in, they tyrannize me, they encroach on my selfhood. But they define me, you see, they tell me what I am, and if I am not told what I am, I do not know what I am... You've just done that for me, below.

And I am aware too that all other objects are in exactly the same situation as myself: minute pole in a vast ocean of counterpoles, I am infinitely isolated, but my situation is infinitely repeated.

You are my counterpole, a rare one for me, in an ocean of superficial mediocrity and shallowness.

All parts of my body are objects external to me: my hands, my tongue, my digestive mechanism. The words I speak are counterpoles. There is no mental activity I cannot stand back from and be towards as to a counterpole. So I am a tissue of counterpoles. My body and my thoughts and my words are like the garden and the rooms and the furniture of my house. Certainly they seem to me more mine than your garden or the room you read in at this moment; but a moment's analysis tells me that they are not mine in any total or scientific sense. They are mine in the artificiality of the law, and the illogicality (or biologicality) of emotion. My garden is this collection of grass, earth, plants, trees that I possess in law and can enjoy while I live; it is not mine. Nothing, not even what I call my self, is mine; individuality and counterpolarity separate me from all.

So, my friend, yes, I'll turn around a bit and look at all the love that awaits me in expectation. Will I ultimately absorb or reflect? And there you are, too, a beautiful person that I wish to, yes, embrace and feel the warmth, finally... The love.

..."I may have been a friend of yours countless of times in eternity. For how else would I not find you on this big planet so easily..."

Bello, bello veramente, the poetry in your heart is indeed sublime!

I should like to refound and create difficulties for everything in me and in front of me. A new design of life.

A roving design for a loving contact, while computerized design expands to infinity the nirvana of its own cold brain.

A human walk in a void of goods and metropolises. I should like a map referring to my activity, not, however, in terms of technologies, or of the forms of creative accomplishment, or of the commercial success of my didactic work.

Even if I thought the generational problem was overcome, I should need not to conform.

I should like to shrug everything off, even the holds that most reassure me, that are my momentary salvation.

I should like to intuit the epoch about to be born, I should like it to be different from the present one. Because today people's souls are closed in defence of an involution that seems to accept, but in fact excludes, the diverse and the novel. That's the source of my lambasting: Man, so Davincian and yet so misspent.
But I should like to meet myself again within the millennial flux of the applied arts.

I should like to discard the monumental aggression of so many words.

One of my most certain points is the attitude towards the uncertain and the weak, towards exposure to the discomfort of the unknown.

After so much rule of logic, I should like types of approach which are stratified, magical, emotional. You know, yes, you know.

I should like to renounce the certainty of the joyous and amoral language, and pursue ancient and tortuous paths, to find objects from beyond my brief time, in a distant vision of the past, present and future.

I should like to think that the slightest movements made by my objects and by my logorrheic fragments were as acupuncture in the body of a mistaken context.
I should like to live a project of availability that led to new, calm, poetical, delicate objectives, suitable for the stages on which the new people will reveal the rituals and the fantasies of a near future -- alive, but destined to die.
I should like to set off again, as I am in fact, on another ideational adventure, alone or in company, to search the darkness of "challenge" for a fascinating unknown risk, hidden more within me than without.

I should like to be an ancestral and amorous person, Kal, to formulate the hyper-moralistic idea of an anti-wordly Concept, I should like my Concept to be capable of absorbing hunger, violence and poverty.

I should think of Giotto or of Kierkegaard, of the maternal womb or of kitsch, of shamans or of Islam, of the wind or of miniaturization, of artists or of the desperate, of religion or of incommunicability.

No more teachers, not for you not for me.

I should like to make clear to myself that the new type of epoch calls for a different person, capable of superimposing the two opposites; telematic solitude and existential dispersion.

I should stake also my personal perdition, my credibility, my isolation, even the impossibility of return... For a friend like you.
No, not all is lost.

"I may have been a friend of yours countless of times in eternity..." You're great.

Kinkazzo

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

From: kal
Sent: Wed 18 June 2003, 14.36
To: Kinkazzo
Subject: Speechless!

Kinky,

You are a truly beautiful person especially when you feel or approach your truth and more especially when we all realize that truth starts to dissipate when we attempt to pin it down running out of words to express! I am in awe over how magnificently you write and yet successfully share with me your pain and your love.

Following that a very deep silence could perhaps take care of the rest in Love! I truly pray that you find realization that you want this lifetime! We all search for this, yet you do it perhaps in such a big way with a big heart.

Yes, I had similar trials with my wife. All I could do is make sure my space is ideal as I can make it and allow her to heal on her own. She was doing her karma balancing, as it seemed that all the things she had repressed, including cosmic fear, had caught up with her at late age. I could see her battle the demons and say little. It is her battle. If we can include their suffering as our own with understanding and compassion, we probably have conquered it abit. Then we let time heal.
Because she is so involved in herself and admitted she could not even contemplate having any relationship much less be a wife, and had asked me to find love elsewhere. It took me a long time to realize that she has meant it. So, we assigned ourselves different sleeping arrangements in the home instead of divorce and did a handshake that I date others instead. This offers her the security for healing under my wing for her family is unable to care for her. We both admit she has no known access to any residual energy to pleasure others, myself included. The sick need to take care of themselves first, it seems. She seems to be doing better and is being more functional in a limited way. She likes this arrangement. It is still hard for her to align with reality among society. Her daily activity is such a hodgepodge of past lives all over the place dramatizing strange scenarios and imaginary people, that are very real to her. To me she is still linked to many of her previous worlds (and fantasies where her fear dramatises itself) where she has unfinished business.The thing to do is to allow her to finish it up naturally. She is strong. Everyone got to their places out of free will and freedom of choice. Best to allow them that fullest responsibility.
They have everything they need. If we doubt it, I think, we do them a great disservice or setback. We do not own our family members. Human bodies are perhaps patient pawns for our incredible experiements! They'd probably prefer for us to do our mental battles in meditation and leave them alone, for they are so tired and just want to play!

I guess can only continue to love and be the best we can be. I appreciate your love, Kink. I cannot pretend I know everything, but I tell all I got and continue to work on myself humbly.

Kal

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

From: kal
Sent: Wed 18 June 2003, 16.21
To: kinkazzo
Subject: An e-book

Kink,

Recently I came across this free ebook "Freedom of Choice" from Australia and thought it succeeded in touching the depths of my cosmic gut. Then I explored all its forums and corresponded with the author, Dr. Tom Chalko, awhile. It seems that "Freedom of hoice" was a marvelous gem of his in spite of anything for I did not find myself satisfied with his human side or could play on his fears that the earth is going to blow up anytime soon. That does not discount what I felt was the significance of his "Freedom of Choice". I feel it has some insights that both you and I could rummage for something we may find personally useful. There seems to be something wonderful in everyone's closet to find. When you got the time, perhaps you could give me your feedback. I think it would touch some good nerves for you.

When I write Dr. Tom however, he seems condescending in his attempts to reply, but I disregard them as personal as his ebook left me refreshed anyway. After all, he is an atomic scientist and entitled to his own opinions of everything or anyone. I can only admire his investment of study as I have been of yours. I have not delved in secrets of math or words as you both have in this lifetime, but I would if I wanted to or had the chance for they fascinate me. I guess we are not meant to cram all the wonderful knowledge into this puny lifetime but do best we can and pick up where we left off in the next realm. As Dr. Tom best expressed, what we take with us after we die is the UNDERSTANDING and the LEARNING HOW TO LEARN and none of the physical knowledge or databank we have so invested so long. I hope you manage to find something out of this ebook. It is short, in large text and 126 pages in pdf.

Kal

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

From: Kinkazzo
Sent: Thur 19 June, 2003, 11.32
To: Kal
Subject: Don't walk in front of me, I may not follow; Don't walk behind me, I may not lead; Walk beside me, and just be my friend.

~ Albert Camus...

Cher ami,

I have saved the book and will certainly read it with deep interest: the topic matter is essential, and will supply me with new perspectives. If you found it refreshing, I'll find it refreshing. Australians are funny, though: having spent 15 years with them, at various universities and other public bodies, I find that they are still searching for an identity and tend to be schizoid. A rough British colony, placed at the antipodes of culture, in a foreign Asian context and with a land singing songlines of dreamtime (you should read Bruce Chatwin SONGLINES, about the Aboriginal understanding of Creation: from a dream, in a song, copulating with the Earth).

I too have corresponded (as you know, I'm hyperlexic!) with some interesting minds, among whom a Russo-American physicist that wanted his book reviewed (he was proclaiming the "desantification of Jihad" via a re-examination of Judaeo-Christian ideologies) before the world collapsed in total chaos; and a computer scientist who had something to say about maths which may interest you, thus:

"I don't believe in the split between humanism and science. Science
and mathematics are a part of human experience.

When I was growing up I wanted to take piano lessons, but there was
never the money for it. So I knew nothing about music (by this I
mean musical structure, like keys, scales, rhythm). I eventually
took piano lessons as an adult. At first I was very discouraged,
since I don't have much musical talent. But then I read a book that
pointed out that music is part of human experience. It belongs to
all of us and everyone who can hear musical tones properly can take
part. While I'll never be much of a musician, I can still play,
enjoy myself and see a bit of the beauty of musical structure.

Like mathematics, music is terribly taught. It seems to me
sometimes that music teachers forget that Bach, Mozart and Beethoven
where great improvisers. Yes they had great technical skill, but
music was not something static for them, limited to a sheet of
music. Jazz seems like the only area where improvisation lives.

This reminds me of the way math is taught. Rather than showing that
math is a notation for ideas, its taught as endless problem solving
(by professors who would rather be somewhere else). Only when I
returned to math after college have I started to see that math is a
language to express ideas. I'm not very good at mathematics, but I
can still make progress. It reminds me of my struggles with the
piano. In both cases I have seen beauty that I did not see before.

For me, cheap computing power has opened up the world. I have
struggled as a writer all my life. Computer text editors have made
writing possible in a way that the typewriter never could (I'm old
enough that I typed papers in college).

Cheap computing power and high resolution graphics displays have
opened up the ideas behind software for me as well. It is such a
huge area that I will not live long enough to explore it all.

I realize that experience is different. Not everyone needs to study
mathematics and computer science. Nor does everone need to read
Hegel (who I've never been able to understand). Or Jean Baudrillard,
who I also tried reading after seeing The Matrix and did not
understand either. Human knowlege is so huge now that we are lucky
if we only know a little bit of our own fields of speciality. But I
believe that it is all part of human experience and knowledge. In a
way, we all own it, even if we do not take part in it."

Still, Kal, correspondence limits my expression of feeling. I would for instance like to see you, face to face, and be able to embrace you - as you wished I should do. Physicality is for me an indispensable part of the emotional life: I must see the person who is the focus of my love and interest, must be able to touch them, feel them, do passionate things with them, absorb their sensations, their words - spoken or breathed - their tense gazing and beckoning.

It enrages me to know that I have a friend in New York who has a radiant mind I could drink from, and yet I cannot touch him.

I had few friends in the course of my existence, because I always intended friendship in such a totally demanding way, that no one wanted to confront such a traumatic experience. The few I had were beautiful, inspirational, incredibly intense: mygod, friendship like the birth of a giant Nova! And like a Nova, suddenly extinguished for want of atomic energy...
My friend, I am not what I seem. Let me cite Gibran at length, since I lack the rhapsodic strength...

...Seeming is but a garment I wear--a care-woven garment that protects me from your questionings and you from my negligence.

The "I" in me, my friend, dwells in the house of silence, and therein it shall remain for ever more, unperceived, unapproachable. I would not have you believe in what I say nor trust in what I do--for my words are naught but your own thoughts in sound and my deeds they own hopes in action.

.......When thou sayest, "The wind bloweth eastward," I say, "Aye, it doth blow eastward"; for I would not have thee know that my mind doth not dwell upon the wind but upon the sea.
Thou canst not understand my seafaring thoughts, nor would I have thee understand. I would be at sea alone.
When it is day with thee, my friend, it is night with me; yet even then I speak of the noontide that dances upon the hills and of the purple shadow that steals its way across the valley; for thou canst not hear the songs of my darkness nor see my wings beating against the stars--and I fain would not have thee hear or see. I would be with night alone.
When thou ascendest to thy Heaven I descend to my Hell--even then thou callest to me across the unbridgeable gulf, "My companion, my comrade," and I call back to thee, "My comrade, my companion"--for I would not have thee see my Hell. The flame would burn thy eyesight and the smoke would crowd thy nostrils. And I love my Hell too well to have thee visit it. I would be in Hell alone.
Thou lovest Truth and Beauty and Righteousness; and I for thy sake say it is well and seemingly to love these things. But in my heart I laugh at thy love. Yet I would not have thee see my laughter. I would laugh alone.
My friend, thou art good and cautious and wise; nay, thou art perfect--and I, too, speak with thee wisely and cautiously. And yet I am mad. But I mask my madness. I would be mad alone.
My friend, thou art not my friend, but how shall I make thee understand? My path is not thy path, yet together we walk, hand in hand..........

"And a youth said, Speak to us of Friendship.
And he answered, saying:
Your friend is your needs answered.
He is your field which you sow with love and reap with thanksgiving.
And he is your board and your fireside.
For you come to him with your hunger, and you seek him for peace.

When your friend speaks his mind you fear not the "nay" in your own mind, nor do you withhold the "ay".
And when he is silent your heart ceases not to listen to his heart;
For without words, in friendship, all thoughts, all desires, all expectations are born and shared, with joy that is unclaimed.
When you part from your friend, you grieve not;
For that which you love most in him may be clearer in his absence, as the mountain to the climber is clearer from the plain.
And let there be no purpose in friendship save the deepening of the spirit.
For love that seeks aught but the disclosure of its own mystery is not love but a net cast forth: and only the unprofitable is caught.

And let your best be for your friend.
If he must know the ebb of your tide, let him know the flood also.
For what is your friend that you should seek him with hours to kill?
Seek him always with hours to live.
For it is his to fill your need, but not your emptiness.
And in the sweetness of friendship let there be laughter, and sharing of pleasures.
For in the dew of little things the heart finds its morning and is refreshed."

----Isn't it magnificent, Kal? Please, say yes -- IT IS MAGNIFICENT! ---and...let there be no purpose in friendship save the deepening of the spirit.

Kink

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

From: Kinkazzo
Sent: Thur 19 June, 2003, 13.56
To: Kal
Subject: Remember A-star-is-X?

Caro Kal,

I started going through the FREEDOM OF CHOICE eBook (which I downloaded, printed and bound: I seem to prefer to old sensorial activity of leafing trough real pages...) and was pleased to see some definitions of God that excited me greatly. So, now I'm enclosing a zipped copy of the Star papers I recently collected into draft form, for possible publication in the not-so-distant future.

Remember? Philosophical/existential disquisitions, ecstatic creativeness and all? I found similar approaches by Dr. Chalko, and therefore I would very much like you to read some of the more enthusiastic chapters, whenever you got time... Then we'll exchange impressions on both approaches.

As Dr. Tom says: all looking for the dog's shit or...the diamond...the tension of existence. Einstein himself tried a few answers, and came up with several more questions. And felt alone.

Yes, the rift between people grows deeper and deeper, and as religion is left behind and rightly dismantled, people find themselves in a spiritual void. We have nothing else to replace it with. We cry out for meaning. And believe me, we do cry out. We see UFOs, engage in channelling, sprit contact, out-of-body experiences, mindquests -- all these eccentric ideas have a scientific veneer, but they are unashamedly irrational. Freud said that religion makes man subdued and passive. Marx famously said that religion was "the pie in the sky". I agree; Chalko agrees. But what's left? Internet? Our new, ever expanding virtual God! These are the desperate cry of the modern soul, lonely and tormented, crippled by its own enlightenment and its inability to accept meaning in anything removed from technology. Science, they say, will save us. Science, I say, has destroyed us. Since the days of Galileo, the promises of science have not been kept. Promises of efficiency and simplicity have bred nothing but pollution and chaos. We are a fractured and frantic species moving down a path of destruction. Who is this God of science? Who is the God who offers his people power but no moral framework to tell you how to use that power? What kind of God gives a child fire but does not warn the child of its dangers? The language of science comes with no signposts about good and bad. Science textbooks tell us how to create a nuclear explosion, and yet they contain no chapter asking us if it is a good or a bad idea. To science I say this: I am tired. I am exhausted from trying to keep up and stay sane. Science world moves so fast that if you stop even for an instant to consider the implications of your actions, someone more efficient will whip past you in a blur.

So science moves on. Science proliferates weapons of mass destruction, and we cannot beseech leaders to use restraint -- no one pays attention. Science clones living creatures, and no one considers the moral implications of our actions. Science encourages people to interact on phones, video screens, and computers -- whilst we so much would love to commune in person as we are meant to do. Look at me now: banging on a keyboard to send you an electronic message! It's not called "a letter" anymore. An electronic message. An email. An electronic impulse going with my words ten thousand miles from me in a second. If I were to take a pen in hand a write you a "proper" letter, I don't think I would be able to. Humanity is forgetting handwriting! The great epistolaries of the past, the great friendships of kindred souls were so intense, so special exactly because they were conquered, sweated out. Walter Benjamin and Gershom Scholem; Thomas Mann and Herman Hesse; Henry Miller and Anais Nin. An envelope with handwriting, containing a letter penned with emotion.
Craving for genuineness.

Science murders unborn babies in the name of research that will save lives. Nobody points out the fallacy of this reasoning. Ignorance. Who is more ignorant, tell me: the man who cannot define lightning, or the man who does not respect its awesome power?

So the scientist writes about metaphysics, out of a sense of guilt. About love out of a sense of hate. About God out of a sense of godlessness... Propounds the Freedom of Choice: understanding is the ultimate tension...Intellect and knowledge is man's salvation. Mystery is darkness...
Sure.
A tension between poles. A choice of poles, the existentialist's dream.

And yet, the power of a tension is proportionate to its mystery. And what a mystery we have here: life! Throughout the ages, man has tried to explain it away. I am trying to explain it away, Kal. Tensing my tension, like the cord of a bow: in being aware of and understanding a tension, I find that two results are engendered. Like lightning on a dark night it reveals what is, and it reveals the way ahead. It thus allows the transposition to a personally or socially less harmful tension to be made. It permits the tension to be controlled, rather than to control.

Knowledge of a tension therefore inaugurates two situations: a seeing through the old, and a craving for a new. because we love and need mystery, we are often reluctant to analyze situations in which mystery seems to inhere. The chief such situation is in ourselves, in the tensions we exist in. We despise primitive cultures for the taboos with which they surround sacred groves and caves and the like; but we still encourage exactly similar taboos in the antique landscapes of the mind.

Yet even here we must distinguish between the selfish attachment to mystery that is really a lazy refusal to think or act and our essential need of a residual mystery in life as a whole. This mystery, between what we know and what we know we will never know, is the ultimate tension.
My tension.

The more knowledge we have the more intense this mystery becomes. It may diminish from our point of view, but it condenses.

We tend to think that evolution must be a vast attack on mystery. We suppose our highest goal must be to know all. We consequently try to ignore, or destroy, or vitiate, what genuine mysteries life contains.

We are intended to solve much of the mystery; it is harmful to us. We have to invent protections against the sun, in many situations; but to wish to destroy the sun? The easier mysteries, how at a superficial level things work mechanically, how things are "caused", have been largely solved. Many take these mysteries for the whole mystery. The price of tapping water into every house is that no one values water any more.

...And look at water now...or lack of it in the world.

The task of education is to show the mysteries solved; but also to show where the mystery has not been, and will not be, solved -- and in the most familiar objects and events. You were a teacher once, right? The msyery of signs, the semiology of sentiment. There is mystery enough at noon; no need to multiply the midnight rites.
Here we come to God, and I concur with Chalko. The counterpole of all that is existent and known or knowable, that is "God", must be infinite mystery, since only so can a tension remain to keep mankind from collapsing into total knowledge, or a "perfect" world that would be a perfect hell. From this knowledge-mystery tension there is no transposing; and it is the source of human being.
(I being Jewish cannot but laudate the quote from the Torah about worship and its perversions: "Do not make a representation of anything that is with Me" 20:20 -- how godlike! Makes you feel proud to be a Jew for 5000 years!)

All predictions are wagers. I've written it so many times I have cramps. All predictions about the future are about what is not scientifically certain, but only scientifically probable. That is Chalko ultimate undoing in its FUTURE chapter. This fundamental uncertainty is essential to life. Every look forward is a potential illusion, sure. This satisfies our need to insecurity; since in an eternally insecure situation we must externally seek knowledge and security, and never completely find them.

Arrivederci amico,
Kinkajoule

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

From: Kinkazzo
Sent: Fri 20 June, 2003, 12.41
To: Kal
Subject: you mentioned the tsunami...well, that's exactly what you get!

Kal,

I want to know two things about you: your art and your deafness.
The latter intrigues me immensely -- tell me please how you communicate in the immediacy of a personal contact with people. How does deafness affect your expressivity and ability to open up to a friend?
And, combining with the former, how does deafness influence your art: is it the natural consequence of wanting to be so photographically realistic? A revenge upon a missing sense: enhancing the visual one to the tenth power?

I would very much like you to expound on your artistic sense... Not to satisfy some sick curiosity of mine, but to better understand your inner-feeling art. I recently came across a book entitled SILENCE IS A FOUR LETTER WORD (On Art & Deafness), by Raymond Luczak, a preview of which you may read at http://raymondluczak.com/silence/ ----- he says things such as:

Art has nothing to do with how much hearing the artist has. And art is not even a universal language. So much depends on our cultural upbringing that sometimes we do reject what is regarded as great artworks in other cultures. When hearing people say that music is a universal language, they are lying. I'd go further than that and say: Music is a universal lie.

and more:

Many artists go mad partly because not enough people around them seem to appreciate their work. By the same token, it's amazing that more deaf people haven't gone mad, as the hearing world isn't always understanding of them. Perhaps deaf people are better suited to be artists more than they realize. Being understood by hearing people has always taken time, so patience and clarity are traits cherished in deaf culture.

But perhaps you know Luczak already, and have answers I do not yet appreciate...

The artist's main need today seems to him to be the expression of his signed feelings about himself and his world; and as our need for representational art has dwindled, so have arisen all those modes and styles, like abstractionism and atonalism and dadaism, that put a very low value on exact representation of the outer world and on past conventions about the artist's duty to that world; but that conversely allow the widest possible field for the expression of an unmistakably unique self.

You appear instead to put quite a high value on exact, photographic representation. It is impressive, almost unsettling. Why?

The modern world and the modern sensibilities are increasingly complex; but it is not the function of the artist to complicate the complexities; if anything, it should be to unravel them. For many nowadays what is taken as a criterion is not the meaning, but a skill in hinting at meanings. Any good computer will beat man at this. You do otherwise: in expressing your feelings about the outer world, you express the feelings of your innerworld. I believe that you do. Am I right?

Enhancing the visual sense so that it screams at you in a Munchan way. The artist being human. Being human is wanting to do and to know and to feel and to understand many things in a short span; and any way of making that knowing, feeling and understanding more available to the many is justifiable. All the achievements of visual art beyond direct representation of appearance are in a sense the triumphs of a deaf-mute over his deaf-muteness, just as in music the triumphs are those of a blind mute over his mute blindness.
You made a similar analogy in your journals...

I'm still reading, as I will do during my weekend break. Reading Chalko, I mean.

It's extraordinary how similar some sections of his eBook are to my writing on the Star, especially his approach to Higher Consciousness and the exercises to Meditation: they border on plagiarism. Extraordinary too is that YOU should bring such a book to my attention, unknowingly (I think) making the conjunction! My daughter Miriam had a quick flick through the pages, unable to resist the curiosity of the title: she immediately made a parallel with Kant and his Critique of Pure Reason, as well as with Henri Bergson's TIME AND FREE WILL: An Essay on the Immediate Data of Consciousness on which she wrote an essay sometime ago. Some quick intellect!

Indeed Chalko seems to base his considerations on much of that philosophical approach, with a good sprinkle of Existentialism à la Sartre for condiment. The whole dish presented with sharpness and down-to-earth motivations: either that or be stupid. Be real now, or be a brainless chicken tomorrow. Be real. Be real...

As if that were simple.

I have never been real; no one is as unreal as I am.

When I wanted to be real, I created disaster. For me, and for others. Because I didn't believe in reality, that's all. So I played it as a game, going through the motions, and the others got piqued ("What, we are soooo very serious about the whole thing, and you play at it???"): mayhem ensued.

If I let myself believe that I am real, my heart races around and my breath gets funny and my nerves twang and jump like wires or grasshoppers set on fire or beams of light but ones that ache. My reality, minute by minute, actual minute by minute, is inset with a flickering madness of joyous self-will and carelessness of which I am deeply ashamed, violently proud. Madness is near, Kal. To murder someone's pride or to pass into social catatonia, these are the common terms of conscious existence for me. Kant or no Kant, Chalko or no Chalko.

Rage or quasi-pietistic acceptance, I distrust the wavering tick-tockishness of the shrinking and of the dangerous enlargement of the self.

The mood and the life's history that has led to this dark and devious grandeur -- the grandeur of lowness -- is linked to self-disgust, self-admiration.
In my room, when I sit or lie in the dark, my madness looms. Reality, time, awareness -- trite problems of everyone searching purpose.

Awareness of the dark, for instance. Not nothingness -- time is something... Am I ill? Surely not, not in the accepted sense. Life is making me ill. I know that the first enclosing paradise was the human belly of my mother *. It was so changeable that I encountered the passage of time in the paradise there, the salt birthplace of my spirit, in my awareness that one would feel better, one would be all right: that was the loose evidence: that was the measure of paradise from the beginning. Amphibious state. The first schizoid state of man. The unreturn that time is includes the mechanical thing that awareness has always an element of resistance to time itself in it. It refuses the identity that time proposes to bestow on minutes, on everything. It is a force of resistance, resistant even to those forces that constitute it. The force of individuality in a particle, since it is time-ridden, would vary and weaken not entirely mechanically and give birth to the world and to anomalies. A balance, a situation has to have a form of awareness, or knowledge, of itself as a balance or how could it exist as moments pass? The urge in time itself is to exist -- and it names and individuates everything in a mystic electricity -- and force -- in eerily always renewed individuation -- until it fails for this or that thing -- the hurried dawns and semi-sleeplessness of matter and its nakedness to the brushing formation and anatomical trespass of the creation of existence -- and then the lapse, the letting go, the decay -- the restlessness of amendment -- in that, I drown, waking-and-sleeping, fluke-attentioned in ways that jeer in the mental light in the dark at really crippling fear until thoughtlight becomes a dance in mental darkness of fear and beyond-fear, a little natural chemical fire in the skull, a little buzz of hellfire--- and resistance -- in the skull, beneath the hair.

Without cure or remission, the flickers of memory and the present-tense of merely-a-room alternate.

And in resignation to the crawling, wormy, maggoty minutes and breaths, the tiny, transparent monkeys of my breath, the snake-flutters of eyelashes and of lungs, I endure my punishment like in a Dali oil.

In the alternations, it seems to me, my shadow eats the world and drags me in its belly (in the mind of my mind) into a moment of eclipse. My darkened self proposes and manages an awful kind of marriage and filial thing with darkness itself, with awful matter. An infant patience, seemingly infinite, inside the night, preserves me as I straddle the alternations and twists and moment-by-moment prolongation of this condition of loneliness and of predicament in amphibian contradiction of everything I have been taught about simplicity and ideas.

Clapping a mind on top of a mind, an observing consciousness, another placement of awareness on top of the one before, and then piling body on mind, on minds, and superimposing a giddily aerial (and sad) form of mind on all of that, and still another form of mind to watch, to judge and observe, I rise to a kind of a glimpse of the nighttime room.

People say, I know all about it... And: We know nothing about that... Explaining or un-explaining man's longing for the Divine Intellect...

I am not tired of God -- but the idea of God is so much simpler than the sense of presence in the passage of moments that I can't ask for anything but merely wait for mercy, here, so long after my birth into the immortality of sheer existence: one rises with a heavy beating of wings into a condition of migration. Thought and recognition of the motions of thought, the most elaborate imaginable collection of simultaneous rifflings of predatory exercises of worded will, stories and whatnot, made of stiff letters erected in a phallic one, a single quill sufficient, or insufficient, for warding off despair. I want to be like a book in its powers of survival. Do you want to be a painting? I feel the whispering inside and outside of me -- strange primal stories: Would you like to speak the language of atoms, Charles? The formation of the cosmos? The first war cries on the shores? If you fail to sleep, you can hear the howling of the electrons in the black spaces in you; and a kind of Troy arises -- and falls then -- the nothing with its peculiar motions stitching it, seamed nothingness, into borders, until it is me -- factual and predicted light of awareness, like light, a form of time...

If you survive this, my friend, you are my long lost Castor!

Yours,

Pollux

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

From: Kal
Sent: Fri 20 June, 2003, 16.20
To: Kinkazzo
Subject: Friendship

Kink,

I'd always want to quickly reply to your eloquent expressions, but please pardon my putting off another day for I was tackling a large order shipment of canvas from Germany for the twin murals I am working on. They are each 300 cm by 525 cm tall. Antiquated depictions of England's and America's coasts for the ocean liner. Yes, I do these kinds of jobs as if they shall finance my purer artistic expressions on
the side. Yes, it seems schizoid and I have resigned to this kind of livelihood, pretty much like you running this language office. I enjoy working at home, then taking leaps at world travel on breaks.

I loved your excerpts from Gibran! Though my prose is like neither of yours and his, I don't think I am often at loss for words to express the depths of what I feel. I guess I would take advantage of the instant understanding arising out of words of economy. Your tapestry of words is just wondrously magnificent! So, I agree with everything you've said so far.

I may or may not appreciate to the levels of your frustration of the awareness levels of the world at large. I can admit that the collective man's mind has not been a pretty sight. Construction sites aren't pretty either so perhaps the mind is still not making its deadline. We have had magnificent completed projects that make any human proud, the art, the architecture, the inventions, etc.. I guess I would have to be patient while everything is seemingly eternally in flux and only
acknowledge Beauty itself here and there like in any curiosa shoppe. We would do to enjoy their contrast among dusty junk: those gems.

Here I shall attempt to quickly answer all your emails. They are fascinating to me! They reawaken my old sleeping philosopher side. I fear saying anything "right" in possibly avoiding complicating your attempts to publish your creations. I would aggressively push out your writings and publish them. And those reservations you mentioned about Information God, I would state them in your introduction, and go ahead.
This would keep your dignity more intact and enable readers to appreciate your mortal admission of being a great writer yet at loss for finesse or that right final word. Please do not let yourself stop you.
I'd want the world to know you. That mind of yours is like a glimpse of what their minds could have been in such an advanced stage of alimentary assimilation.

My other feeling is that you have been in the schools of philosophy deeply for a very long time that you almost left this universe but decided to hang out abit longer and this is wearing your patience more than you had anticipated. You are very ready for the next realm level. A close analogy of this perhaps would be an Angel in Eden lingering too long to see how the progeny are doing when he could have left it totally in Adam and Eve's hands. Even my analogy leaves room for additional explanations. Your unrest is unbearable to you and those around you for you often talk about this torment. Maybe you should just laugh it off and rest abit. To me the Mass Mind is such a convoluted ogre and shall in long time straighten itself out, who knows. I have recently appreciated the notion that any creation would be accompanied by a warning label! That is the price of creation out of any vaccuum. The
creation is just not US. Admit it! And know thyself.

Unlike you, I goofed around most of my current lifetime. Perhaps I had to. It was such a surfer's mentality. Then I decided to WORK at some point later in life. So, I am no match for you, but I can still be somewhat a friend fleetingly and naturally if it fits the required ingredients of any possible friendship. I think when people are physically together, a physical friendship gets to be explored and experienced. Cyberwise, I think it is quite different, however eventual meetings from my experience among new cyber friends have been enjoyable, not all of them. I had to find out in my travels. That was amusing.

This leaves me wondering what our encounter in Italy would be like? Are you a very busy person generally? Is your ass big from all that booklearning? Do you like physical activity like I enjoy most: swimming, hiking, trying strange roads and countries untried, worming through ruins, climbing coastal cliffs, speaking to strangers at random, trying out international cuisines, discovering lifestyles of new friends, etc.?
Were I to go to Bologna, what would we do or what would I do? Some of my friends have succeeded, though not always, in putting aside like no more than two days to drive around with me and just plain have fun. For example, one Shingon monk in Japan, actually from Zurich, wanted to be my friend and told his wife that he wanted to give me a tour of the Buddhist temples, all the golden Buddhas, and the segregated hot springs that Japan is so famous for. I enjoyed that. We were like snow monkeys in water! Another cyber friend I visited in north of London took me in
his racy Jaquar taking me at speeds of 120 mph to see his new renovated thatched roof barn conversion home. He collected fantasy books and like you, is shrewd and funny. He makes his living off the stock market.
Another from Ireland, a young alcoholic, impoverished from his crippling self depreciation and ahbhorence of study likes to hike, but I wonder what we have in common!!! I think I just know him from past lives! Some people are magnets to me that defy explanation! I loaned him a good amount of money and said not a cent more! Now he has to figure out a lifetime how to repay. With you, my guess is we do enjoy some favorite restaurant meal, appreciating your book collection, a question and
answer period, an introduction to your family, perhaps a dip in a pastoral water hole on hot day, a favorite nearby landmark, and actually not much need for philosophical discourse, for I would just be "there" for you or for myself. If you enjoy my presence, I would be just flattered and satisfied. Would two days be more than enough? Just wondering.

To answer your questions about myself....honestly, I feel I have experience being deaf interspersed within sporadic lifetimes that it was overcome very quickly on my part, only that it was toughest during adolescence. I hadn't caught up on speed and ease of listening among my peers, who actually have nothing to say but sexual chatter of the macho business you find in schools at all levels. Such a tease! I had no friends in my estimation. Now I do and thanks to my super ability to
read lips and carry on conversation. This is limited to maximum of a crowd of 2 to 4 people. At a round table of 5 or more, like in a restaurant, I get lost completely. It depends on the deaf individual and their ability or practice. In that case, I'd just enjoy my meal. One on one conversation is so ideal and relatively easy and would not be ever a problem in conversation with you. This is not the province of the
average deafened person. It is a bitter world of angry and frustrated people, only a few make it comfortably. Their solution is to create a totally visual culture by means of sign language and now, the internet, which they seem to be rising out of the ashes with. I know of deaf illiterates who have managed to pirate the internet and I am impressed!
I have mentioned to you before that I used to teach and at a time when I was in my early twenties teaching this bundle of 7 year old mutes, never did I conceive that these youngsters shall one day in their thirties father children and be my tech support! It shows how the human spirit has freaky surprises.

I do not feel I have the time or energy to expand upon my feelings about deafness' impact on my art or career preferences. It might be self explanatory. That is a copout answer, isn't it? Actually, I don't even think about my deafness. Lately, I have reinstated music as a means of enjoyment while I paint. I have been playing loudly in the background in my studio some CD/s on Korean Buddhist temple music or Tangerine Dreams.

Mainly, I just find the right sounds that enable me to relax in front of the easel more and to keep me in front of it. I tend to take many breaks but wish to have a good go at longer bouts of painting in order to get more done. I am moving toward surrealism, but even that is not the best definition. It is not my deafness, I feel, but my fascination with the recent surfacings of consciousness and non objective realities that are influencing what I wish to paint or capture. I like now my photoshop and digital photography. I feel they make a nice blend. The closest artist
to my curiosity level is Jeff Koons. Though I do not fully appreciate his exhibitionism with this topless Italian mayor candidate (Chichiolina sp?), I do like his colorful canvases where they border on breaking apart, recalling style of James Rosenquist(see picture above). I also enjoy the colors of Wolf Kahn, but why always trees? I still love his work though. So you got the idea perhaps of what is brewing inside me. I am now greater than ever more willing to take leaps at marring the surface of convention.
The shatter and the realism of Koons seem to assure me that my photorealism skills are not to be wasted. I want to leap yet want to stay tethered. Could be an old hunger instinct or a need to pay bills in balance. I think so. The next few years and on shall find me in new uncharted territory. The one I am working on now, I promise to send you a photo later by email when completed. Furthermore, very recently I was greatly moved by the stillness of zen architecture, indoors and outdoors in Japan. So, this is an interesting discipline that I face myself with.
Friends like you have told me to CREATE! That was like telling one to quit smoking (I don't smoke or drink). I do feel the time is ripe as I am more restless so. Does this answer your question?

My spare time begins to diminish as I embark on this mural project. The agent gave me a pathetic tight deadline. I may not answer all your emails to your satisfaction. Today, I try. Though not certain at this point, I am contemplating European road travel on my visit to Paris/Normandy in late October. I will do my best to figure how to include Bologna or any convenient city for us to meet. Alright?

Take care my friend, love your words! I hope you shall tolerate with ease the zen of my words.

Kal

PS: When you are done with Freedom of Choice, I got another book to recommend that I am currently reading now....
The Eye of the "I" by David R. Hawkins. It is merely a diary of his personal cosmic consciousness experiences. He does not write as well as you even but he does attempt successfully to define these not so often expressed states.
He happens to profess theories on kinesiology which I find seems to work. Whenever my intuition seems to not surface when I need it, such as in moments of indecision, I adopted a kinesilogical self approach of doing pushups on the floor. I measure the vigor that I rise myself and say, yes, confirmed! The body's cells seem to be the law of majority rule, I don't know for sure. Pardon my unothodoxy and whim.

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

From: Kal
Sent: Sat 21 June, 2003, 5.03
To: The Kink
Subject: Buon Giorno

Kinkazzo,

You certainly are not hiding behind the role of a book critic to escape the responsibility of being an author, huh? Are you not? You are such a brilliant, brilliant writer. Please don't get swollen headed until you have made it toward your first booksigning stages.

I was thinking how you would survive my family today. Though I am only one of 9 sibblings in the New York area remaining. We were all brought up at a nice large family home in Long Island with a beach and gardens.
In retrospect, in my extreme honest opinion, they all seem like veterinarians raising lovely litter. The entire family revolves around the babies, grandchildren, etc. Never goes beyond that. Know how courageous it is to pretend that this life is all there is? as opposed to facing immortality and concepts like infinity, free will,
consciousness, death, etc.. I had to create my sanity by transcending this very tight mold.

To illustrate an example, my brother's in laws died tragically in an auto crash last summer. When I got an email while at Lake Tahoe of the news, I went completely in some kind of electrical effervescent rush all over. The deceased were talking to me and mingling with my energies and somehow expressing an acknowledgement that they are indeed in
communication with me. When I told this to my brother and his wife, they got very upset or really fazed and warned me sternly to never bring it up. They had wanted to grieve in THEIR OWN WAY, God knows how. They do it by crying daily. Fine with me. As for myself, if I lost any close one, I am right there with them even in reverie. I have done waltzes with my late grandmother weeks after her death back in the 60s.

Tell me, do you brush upon these things are is this just rubbish to you?
I am very aware of feelings, even mountains, soil, internationalities, even buildings weep to me. When I was in Kyoto, I was repulsed by the modernization as if it had destroyed my beloved city of old. Then as I approached the perimeter of the outskirts into the green verdant hills, the temples appeared! They were massive and constructed of giant redwoods with pillars the size of your compact car. Just imagine for a moment, after some hours soaking in the beauty of the temple gardens in
the morning sun, I decided to leave and get on the road and see the rest of Japan. Just as I reached the city line leaving, I started sobbing.
Did not know why, but it felt as if I made old vows to never leave Kyoto.

So, you may be even up to something when you go places like Scotland and stuff. Last June, I drove 4000 miles in UK in a compact Citroen. Visited Skye, the Highlands, Edinburgh (had a strong feeling there just similar to Kyoto, a feeling of morbid awe), and at the countrysides, I exulted in the soft peat moss of the moors, went horseback riding, (also cried on the horse at one point when the hills appeared just the very right angle toward me. It was as if picture frames here and there matched the past exactly, for many portions of the UK is UNCHANGED. That to me is like a gift! This happened to me in Peru, Korea, Hawaii, etc.. Much appreciation going on.

If you noticed, I am more slanted on gut feeling stuff. Is that in any way of amusement for you or not? I think I shall be travelling around the globe for a very long time. I want to go to St. Petersburg, even at any risk of breaches of comfort zones. I was fine in Peru, Japan,Korea and Hawaii. But when I am informed I need a sponsor for Russia, I begin to wonder when it shall be outmoded. Why not can people trust more? I will however admit some grave American errors over the century in
foreign affairs. I am not nationalistic, for the Milky Way is my least nationality.

Atoms? I love reading about atoms, talking about them, not sure. Why don't you write your book and I will leisurely read the pages as I please on my own breaks. I am brought to memory how you seemed to get some volunteering out of me, giving me some kind of weird orders to give you ecstasy. I am not up to that stuff. Go ahead write your book!
Publish it, I will read them. Then I will see if I want to volunteer anything. Not right now. I fear what you shall expect of me. Remember, I bailed out. I was too busy to get such involved with you. Do it yourself, man! The answers and ecstasy according to Chalko among some, are WITHIN you, and only YOU can pull them up. Go ahead bro!

Kal (I have been using a nickname KAL, so what is this Castor or that name you signed off with today P.....?)

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

From: Kal
Sent: Sat 21 June, 2003, 5.12
To: kinkazzo
Subject: Speaking

Kinky,

I speak rather well. Some say I have a hint of alien accent. That is due to my inability to hear voices exactly and I have little means to monitor my speech output. Two people have said to me that my personality and manner is similar to those of Jackie Kahn. (I only made it up to white belt Judo in university). I have strong phonetic background and development that I am able to pronounce and speak some French, Spanish, Italian, even Korean and Japanese. It is because of my strong phonetic reliance and ability to pick them up right from the phrase books with
ease. I am impressed with your supremacy over the English language.
Really. I would love all of what you have, but I guess I am happy with ME. I like people for this reason, for their diversity and for their gift of opening up more of my perceptions. I like also seeing into others' souls. I do, like you, tire of, tame civilized religion talk and false securities. Beyond my limits of patience! Like wondering into an animal's eyes if they can comprehend what we can. There are humans who don't even scratch the surface and they are numerous! Who are bravest?
we or they? Their sense of security and sureness or arrogance is apalling! You and I both understand this too coldly. We won't complain but relish that one another can attempt to understand deeply another.
Boldly where no insect has gone.I wonder if your wife can sink into your depths too? I imagine so, to some different extent, as does your dear daughter in certain ways too. And you have certain select favorite contacts that you engage in deep wading too?

Have an adventurous weekend! Or herenow.

Kal (Kal is easier for me to pronounce and introduce to strangers than my real name, if you asked why the......)

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

From: Kinkazzo
Sent: Mon 23 June, 2003, 11.43
To: Kal
Subject: A Greek Myth for you, about friendship...

> (I have been using a nickname KAL, so what is this Castor or
> that name you signed off with today P.....?)

CASTOR AND POLLUX

Castor and Pollux were the offspring of Leda and the Swan, under which disguise Jupiter had concealed himself. Leda gave, birth to an egg from which sprang the twins. Helen, so famous afterwards as the cause of the Trojan war, was their sister.

When Theseus and his friend Pirithous had carried off Helen from Sparta, the youthful heroes, Castor and Pollux, with their followers, hastened to her rescue. Theseus was absent from Attica and the brothers were successful in recovering their sister.

Castor was famous for taming and managing horses, and Pollux for skill in boxing. They were united by the warmest affection and inseparable in all their enterprises. They accompanied the Argonautic expedition. During the voyage a storm arose, and Orpheus prayed to the Samothracian gods, and played on his harp, whereupon the storm ceased and stars appeared on the heads of the brothers. From this incident, Castor and Pollux came afterwards to be considered the patron deities of seamen and voyagers, and the lambent flames, which in certain states of the atmosphere play round the sails and masts of vessels, were called by their names.

After the Argonautic expedition, we find Castor and Pollux engaged in a war with Idas and Lynceus. Castor was slain, and Pollux, inconsolable for the loss of his brother, besought Jupiter to be permitted to give his own life as a ransom for him. Jupiter so far consented as to allow the two brothers to enjoy the boon of life alternately, passing one day under the earth and the next in the heavenly abodes. According to another form of the story, Jupiter rewarded the attachment of the brothers by placing them among the stars as Gemini the Twins .

They received divine honours under the name of Dioscuri (sons of Jove). They were believed to have appeared occasionally in later times, taking part with one side or the other, in hard-fought fields, and were said on such occasions to be mounted on magnificent white steeds. Thus in the early history of Rome they are said to have assisted the Romans at the battle of Lake Regillus, and after the victory a temple was erected in their honour on the spot where they appeared.

Macaulay, in his "Lays of Ancient Rome", thus alludes to the legend:

"So like they were, no mortal
Might one from other know;
White as snow their armour was,
Their steeds were white as snow.
Never on earthly anvil
Did such rare armour gleam,
And never did such gallant steeds
Drink of an earthly stream.

"Back comes the chief in triumph
Who in the hour of fight
Hath seen the great twin Brethren
In harness on his right.
Safe comes the ship to haven,
Through billows and through gales,
If once the great Twin Brethren
Sit shining on the sails."

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

From: Kinkazzo
Sent: Mon 23 June, 2003, 12.48
To: Kal
Subject: RE: Speaking

> Two people have said to me that my personality
> and manner is similar to those of Jackie Kahn. (I only made it up to
> white belt Judo in university).

Jackie Chan was my son's preferred actor in his teen: in fact he started going to TaeKwonDo classes just because of him. I myself was an orange belt in Judo: as you see, we have had points of convergence in our lives.

I felt the Edinburgh vibrations too, Kal, that's probably why I will move there soon.

Another small step for me, a giant one for humanity! Aha hahah ahah!! You ask what we could do together? Mygod, we could move mountains together! Kal, I've done everything, you name it I've done it. I've been a priest, an officer, a hermit, a vagrant, a journeyman, a spook, a teacher, a rabbi, an academic; I've talked to monks, to terrorists, to writers, to saints, to wandering Jews, to crazed mystics. Kal, I love life, I want to take it all in!

I cannot rest, I could just take you by the arm and piroette you into the infinite beauty of lakes, of foreign voices you would perceive with your heart, with your beautiful mind. We could dance on the waters of Nile, along the Western Wall of Jerusalem, on top of Himalaya where my father lived for 6 years. I could go through rainforest with you, Kal, I could sing the poems of Whitman and walk the open road skipping like a madman. I've done all that, Kal, and more...
Music to my insatiable ears. Tangerine Dreams: I love them! Ever listened to ENIGMA, a strange group of musicians? I thrive on music. And words. And their association. Poetry. Music. Logos. Sight.

Music and painting -- they are languages of the mind minus words. Music is the language of aural sensation; painting, of visual. I wrote to you about this before. I need to express it to you, who would understand better than anyone. I want to feel it ALL. The Language substitutes: music and painting. At times they are far more effective in communicating than verbal language proper. Visual art can convey appearance better than words, but as soon as it tries to convey what lies behind visual appearance, words are increasingly likely to be of more use and value. Similarly music can convey sound, and very often generalized emotion, better than words; but with the same disadvantage when we try to go beyond the surface of the sound or the emotions it evokes.

Right now I'm listening to the "Age of Loneliness" by ENIGMA and writing to you, because you understand me. I have now reached the end of my tolerance for my present situation: I'm gonna change soon, very soon Kal.
Next song: The Cross of Changes. How appropriate! All my life has been a perpetual change: my wife's immense love for me has endured through all the change. Perhaps my children have suffred, though. My son especially: a continuous restless change, eradication from place to place. But I must go on. I saturate easily and must keep walking.
And all the time, music accompanies me. The language of music convey natural sound to me and creates sound which is pleasurable purely as sound: my sound, my life's soundtrack. Christ! How can I publish a book if I can hardly breathe my passion? I need a crystallizer. YOU!

Music is my evoker of emotions. As I listen to exciting music, I listen to my heart considering the steps of my life: Kal, I was in jungles shooting; I was in churches preaching; I was in countries spying; I hated my father and my mother, because they did not love me as much as they loved themselves. My father I still hate, as I forget about his ashes in the urn of my mind. He was an adventurer, egoistical and maniacal in his pursuing wars and the tormenting gods of his hardened soul. And yet, damned irony, I repeated his steps, one by one, irrevocably.

My mother was one of seven girls, engendered by a monastic sculptor who created statues for the immortality of the dead --- and so the story goes, in a biography of impulsive turnovers and lack of loving words. The soundtrack of my inconstant existence, the natural sounds far better than my selflaudatory words, with theri clumsy techniques of onomatopoeia; creating pure sound as words can only if they are largely deprived of meaning, and then only within the narrow range of the human voice.

But the Word is inherent in every artistic situation, is it not? if for no other reason than that we can analyse our feelings about the other arts only in words. This is because the word is man's most precise and inclusive tool; and poetry is the using of this most precise and inclusive tool memorably. So, a poem here for you, Kal....

I shot an arrow into the air,
It fell to earth, I knew not where;
For, so swiftly it flew, the sight
Could not follow it in its flight.

I breathed a song into the air,
It fell to earth, I knew not where;
For who has sight so keen and strong,
That it can follow the flight of song?

Long, long afterward, in an oak
I found the arrow, still unbroke;
And the song, from beginning to end,
I found again in the heart of a friend.
--by Longfellow

No rubbish comes from you, my friend. I do appreciate your disquisition about metaphysical experiences and share your feelings about the deceased: I think ultimately we'll become part of the Universe in a single immense Eternal Intellect, not so different from Chalko's exposition. It is only logical we should sense electrical waves of such an Intellect engendered by parts of It... And yet, the Viennese Circle issued a statement in the 20s:

"The metaphysicians and theologians, misinterpreting their own sentences, believe that their sentences assert something, represent some state of affairs. Nevertheless, analysis shows that these sentences do not say anything, being instead only an expression of some emotional attitude. To express this may certainly be a significant task. However, the adequate means for its expression is art, for example lyric poetry or painting or music." There you are, then.

I want to talk to the Infinite, Kal, I want to take it all in and explode. The Supernova of my unlimited microcosmos. Now, I wish to describe a Supernova to you and re-dimension man within his Universe: a supernova is a star that explodes as a result of violent internal changes of pressure (think of Solaro!), which lead to an equally violent nuclear reaction. In the first second of such an explosion as much energy may be released as in the course of 1,000 million years of the star's normal nuclear reaction processes. Imagine! It's me, Kal, it's me!!! Such explosions may have an intense phase of a fortnight or more, and all life on the supernova's own and neighbouring star's planetary systems would be charred to nothingness. Scientists have calculated that in our own galaxy alone there are at least 100,000 million stars capable of evolving human life on their planetary systems... No one is talking to me, yet, but they will. And I will waltz with them as you do with your grandma!

If summer were an axiom, what sorcery had snow? chants Emily Dickinson. My phoenix infinity, keeps resurging into my heart in a continuous effluve of discontent: I will move on, my brilliant artist, with you or without you. If life were one long happy summer, we should be without the mysterious truths we learn from our winters of suffering...says Emily... And here I am, raring to go again, in the summer of my discontent...ah ahaha hah!!!.

Pollux?

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

From: Kinkazzo
Sent: Mon 23 June, 2003. 13.28
To: Kal
Subject: RE: Friendship

> This leaves me wondering what our encounter in Italy would be
> like? Are you a very busy person generally? Is your ass big from all that
> booklearning? Do you like physical activity like I enjoy
> most: swimming, hiking, trying strange roads and countries untried, worming through
> ruins, climbing coastal cliffs, speaking to strangers at random, trying
> out international cuisines, discovering lifestyles of new friends, etc.?

We would do that and more, surely. When I start going, I really start going! I'm able to tour Paris on foot anytime, or hiking through miles of Sinai desert just so I can float on a cube of salt on the Dead Sea. You, you Kal, would be a perfect companion to me, to my wife, to my sensitive children... We all live a different stange dimension, and do not seem to accept normality. Allow me to enclose some digital (!) photos to better illustrate our diversity...

I have held fantastic jobs, my friend, chiefly due to my ability to disguise myself like a Prothean chameleon. I have been paid extravagant salaries and dealt with personalities, politicians, powerful morons... all to the waste bin, all to the trash file... Bah.

I have many degrees from many exotic universities. My visiting cards are toilet-roll length!

It makes one wonder and laugh. I recycle myself constantly: new appoitments, new countries, new lives. But I'm getting tired, and people feel it.

Time for one more change, I believe. The endgame.

Man grows from his smallest to his greatest by removing excess and remedying deficiency. But man must cling to what is common to all, as a city clings to its laws? I feel depressed, Kal, and am losing interest fast. What is not cannot come into being. Agree? From where will it come? Ahaa, the music of the spheres: listen to it, Kal. It's in the background now, as I write you. All diminishes and increases to the greatest possible maximum and the least possible minimum. "Becoming" and "perishing" are popular expressions; they are really "mixing" and "separating". Becoming and perishing are the same thing, mixing and separating are the same thing; increase and diminution are the same thing; they are all the same thing and so is the relation of the individual to all things, and all things to the individual; yet in spite of appearances nothing of all things is the same. What shall I do? Will you come to my rescue? No, perhaps not. You must paint your livelihood on transatlantic nuances... It is not better that men should have all they want.

I had much, and much I rejected.

Man, like a light in the night, is kindled and put out.

> I feel they make a nice blend. The closest artist
> to my curiosity level is Jeff Koons. Though I do not fully
> appreciate his exhibitionism with this topless Italian mayor candidate
> (Chichiolina - sp?), I do like his colorful canvases where they border on breaking
> apart, recalling style of James Rosenquist.

Well well, I just read an article on Koons on an Italian magazine, showing some of his work. Telepathic, no? Yes, he married Cicciolina, a Rumenian pornostar of basic dimensions who begat a child in Italy, centre of tragic disputes between the two. Sad. To me, it shows a quest for sensationalism not otherwise obtainable: and yet, what not in order to surface from mediocrity? Perhaps, that was his trampoline to creativeness...

Kinky

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

From: Kinkazzo
Sent: Mon 23 June, 2003, 15.50
To: Kal
Subject: RE: Speaking

> You and I both understand this too coldly. We won't
> complain
> but relish that one another can attempt to understand deeply another.
> Boldly where no insect has gone.I wonder if your wife can
> sink into your
> depths too? I imagine so, to some different extent, as does your dear
> daughter in certain ways too. And you have certain select favorite
> contacts that you engage in deep wading too?

Oh, Kal, I had a friend once who was the very embodiment of all my wants! We soared like eagles over peaks of poetic magnitude, our minds a cauldron of extraordinary sensations and overwhelming actions... We travelled, hitch-hiked indefatigably, sleeping under bridges and the stars of Venice, Paris, Bruges, Torremolinos... In fact the sky was our limit, and... wow, now Enya is chanting Celtic melodies in my background... how sweet and emotionally great...my skin reacts immediately. You see Charles, the force of my spirit? I vibrate like a chord in a psychic harp. Nothing can restrain me, not even Satan... I am great, of a greatness I cannot comprehend, and want to combine with yours, with my children, with my exceptional wife, with anyone who can feel as I feel, the force of a Universal Mind.

With my only real friend I was able to touch on such greatness and fly undisturbed through clouds of virgin passions. I felt in complete pantheistic communion. No word or silence could say how much I loved all I experienced with him, the anarchic grass over which I treaded, those eternally hippy wild flowers of youth, bushes so asymmetrical in my mind as to evoke the hedges of a Zen Buddhist monastery garden you would so love yourself, those incorrigibly invasive acacias, the chestnut trees of my soul so affable and reassuring, who knows why?, the young and beautiful oaks of my aged years always in search of admirers, those maple trees of lyricism I shared with him through lectures of Rimbaud and Auden along the parks of Villa Borghese... I waxed lyrical, yes, yes, yessss I felt like a Lord on earth, the Gaia Master of Emotion. The ecstasy of friendship, of a shared moment of greatness! A multisensorial orgasm of beauty, wandering around Gaia, our marvellous planet Earth, equipped with an inward Eye of exceptional dimensions. A vital pulsation, a powerful vibratory presence, unique in the relation of friendship.

And since I not only look a fool, but really am one, I seemed to intuit his "soul state" and feel it full of a strange longing. A melancholy lust for the pleasure of pure beauty. A revelation. A thousand and one tears of intensity. A wave of tenderness pervading my whole being...and his? O God, his?

Through him I knew my future wife, being his sister. He withdrew in anxiety and terror, for a feeling never felt before. And disappeared...
On one of my returns from Australia and the East, I found him a priest, annihilated by faith, never to be the same again.

Shit, man, I feel like banging my head against a concrete wall. Even now, after all these years. Man, a zombie would not suffice in describing him.

And the Celtic beauty of my poetic dreams? What of them, Charles, what of them? What of my creative ecstasy, Charles? Tell me, christ, what of them?
A thousand and one tears.

Hence my criticism, my dissatisfied look on humanity, and more. Where is the Tao when you need it?

Where is the Tao, Kal? And the Tao says... It is before thinking, before virtue, before distinctions, before birth and death. It is unattainable and yet ever present. All understanding is a gradual yielding to the Tao, or so it says... Questions and answers are the first yielding. Many are mine... The answer is that there are no damned answers. All questions are wrong. Struggling with wrong questions will never give right answers. Finding right answers misses the Tao.
Where is the fucking Tao? With full awareness, think without thoughts, it says, the Tao -- expect without expectations. Be amazed but not surprised. yes, yes, yes. Be amazed indeed. Become everything's shape. This is the way of selflessly thinking the world.
I cannot.
I truly cannot.

But, if the hard struggle of the self is chosen, how do I keep balanced on both? The foot that advances and the foot that retreats? The Tao says: understand that retreat does not go backwards and advance does not go forwards. The Way will be closer as self and struggles soften...

Hmm, what then of my true friend? Did he struggle without me? Yes, he did and died. A journey to hell, just like Rimbaud.

I never had a friendship like that one, ever again, ever ever ever ever.

Than there is YOU. In cyberspace. Ah, the pain and irony. I never liked cyber. Never technology, always the humanist. Yet, the very moment you sent me that email two year ago, I knew all was not lost -- like you often say. There are human beings able to comprehend the magic of Emotion... I never really let you go, as you did. Once a link is established, it is there to endure.

I visited you every now and then. You know it.

Now I wish to move on, but always want others to take part in my movement, and feel the electrical shock of the motion with me. How beautiful it is, and how devastating: destroy your past and recreate your future...Never really accomplished: the destruction is always partial.

A light breeze hesitates around me. The air is pure as the soul of a Buddha. The sky is limpid and bright as the heart of E.T. of Spielbergian memory.
I am ready to change, once more. Perhaps the last time?

Charles, with the lights out, in the most ontological silence, I gently place the palms of my yearning hands on the heart of my soul, I close my eyes and with infinite expectancy prepare to savour an infinity of pain in a way only I know how to feel. The pain of ecstatic vision.

It is a moment of extraordinary intensity that catapults me into the first day of creation. I feel the scope of my desire: a desire for emotional transfiguration that equals nothing, Kal, not even the explosion of the Supernova of my past message... Still, I wish to make you share it, now, while I feel it, now yes!

Ah, friend, if you were here with me! None of that simple communion of experiences along treaded routes. You would share a unique trip to intensity... In the very moment in which I'd shake your hand, you would perceive and interpret my biorhythm and all my vibrations, with the knowledge of your mute extrasensory wisdom. And my biorhythm would immediately return to optimum vital level and my whole Being would pass from the melancholy-depressive to the most harmonious tonic-active vibrational frequency. Spreading onto you like an aura. Yeah, man, yeah: I need you to become real, and not just a cyber presence: how fucking depressing, a cyber presence indeed. You are a flesh and blood human, are you not? Then transmit to me, with all the tenderness of a real warm embrace, your marvellous, vividly coloured images of your pictorial art and make'em flow into my mind. I'd visualise greatly loved landscapes, faces of favourite people (finally!) and animals, adored paintings, sculptures and objets d'art, aphorisms and extracts of poetry and prose of amazing beauty and profundity, with a perfectly intuited backgrounbd music, celestial to say the least.

All this transforms me, Kal, transmutes me ispo facto.
You'd loosen all the knots of my compressed energy and empty all the sacks of neurosis.

Enuff

Enuff of cyber messages. I want the real thing.

In fact I have the absolutely indescribable sensation of having received a massage-message to the soul. Right now, on reading your last messages-massages. Can't you stand my verbosity? I think you can. And I have Tangerine's Birdwatcher's Dream on, to supply the right background.

While I gloat light, fluid and vibrating with joy and peace in a state of pre-Nirvana, because of my inspirational state... I understand that communion of kindred spirits is a soliloquy of cosmic import, architecture of extreme spatial possibilities. Communion --- friendship is in fact a spatial fresco, I do believe.
And as you fresco your murales for the ocean liner, I find light and shadow of the spirit in the spring of my Emotion. From the abyss that we are, both...

The strength come to us from the unexplored regions of the Ego, the Mind's Eye to offer itself to community.

That fresco, Kal, that image lives in the background space, in the remote cellars of the Ego that borders on the cellars of all the other companions and brothers, printed on the eternal pages.

And so it comes up from free imagination, from the hand in direct contact with the heart, like writing, its brake invisible and pure.

I must let you go now, to the chores of your art and the disheartening tasks of my Socratic dungeon.

I will change.

The number 9 is magical within Kabbalah, and the third Sefira (you were the 3rd child of 9, in your family, right?) of the Tree of Life is the Binah : Understanding and Intelligence. You, Kal.

You made a troubador chant again,

Kink

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

From: Kal
Sent: Mon 23 June, 2003, 17.14
To: kinkazzo
Subject: Vision does not fit our hard drive

Morning!
What an attractive family! Don't worry about other souls, they live! I just wonder about those who abuse substance and grey matter. Chalko believes it is the worst thing one can do in preparation for the afterlife. That is just one opinion. There is lots I don't know even!
But I do find a space of peace is conducive for anyone's healing. I guess we have Ellysian fields or Valley of the Dead for that and Zen gardens for the present duration.

I love your magnanimity, if I correctly know what that word means. I looked it up... the quality of being magnanimous: loftiness of spirit enabling one to bear trouble calmly, to disdain meanness and pettiness, and to display a noble generosity. No, that is not the one quite for you....how about vivaciousness (vivavoce) lively in temper, conduct, or spirit : SPRIGHTLY
That is the one, and it is refreshing to me, but more definitions can fit or barely grasp your arbitrary definition! How can we define ourselves anyway! We are limitless essentially. Or boundless. I admit I take advantage of your incredible vocabulary if you don't mind. I have too few words! But lots of paint. I define you by your (e)motion and its reaches.

Let you old priest friend/lover be a humble lesson? A lesson perhaps that some of us or perhaps all of us shall take breaks from any egoform we latch onto. We do shed quite abit and the snakeskin anaology fits the description. Chameleon is another, ever changing for purposes of survival or even escaping the world.

I take people to be gifts, temporary. Myself included. Friends come and go, and some even return. But the vibrations we emanate do have their precise consequences....we attract new types most always. It is best we learn to overcome the sometimes painful process of letting go and without bitterness. Bitterness is not the thing, but a newer creation not having much to do with the item that got lost. I always forgive
instantly. Always.

I have advised friends to forgive their parents and antagonists with the understanding that it would part the Red Seas of pain asunder. I have advised people not to create expectations of others but allow the object of expectation to be transfered to a new friend. The universe seems to have a way of giving you what you want but relieves the burden of an old friend who cannot give it to you. If you can release all your friends, you can have anything. Anyone else can be the new bearer of your gift request. Anyone. So let the others go. They are tired perhaps or cannot
simply give it to you. Be good to yourself, and not cause emotional anquish. Can you do that? Let go of anyone, or everyone. As babies on your lap. They cannot be expected to sit still but if you amuse yourself, you would still find them in your space, your shoulder, your hair, your leg, but they don't keep still. I have pet cockatoos and they do what they will and find their positions on my body. Sometimes they meditate on me, and sometimes they tug at me. For five minutes, time is
up and they are somewhere else on my body or in front of me. Restless creatures for the most part. They taught me to let things slip through my fingers with ease.

I also tell my friends to try and send beams of love toward the missing loved one(s). Certain magical things could take place. It is a soul thing. It is such a simple thing and not an obvious solution when one is perhaps emotionally (dis)wrought. Try sending a million beams out there in space, with a coded message from the heart "HI, I LOVE YOU!" then listen in meditation. I always feel a certain cosmic pop(s) or stirrings reflected back to my heart. We have loved so many. We are
love, lover, and the beloved in one fell swoop.

I am a little tired. Perhaps it is the white murals facing me. I know my promises and obligations. What I do is project my suggestions in a very positive manner with absolutely no room for negative encounter in any of my creation. I handle discontented people this way, by creating a worm for them, "It is going to be a great turnout" or whatever. People have forgotten to create these borders for their creation. To give you an extreme example, I created a tombstone in mind, "I had a blast and look forward to more". That is the value of positive suggestion. After all
isn't it a creation in itself? What are we creating? We are Creators, if we forgot. I didn't forget. Most people do however. They are in a skipped record of justify, blame, justify, etc... they are still responsible for their creation in its entirety and holographically. So, I hope your creations and bigger creations and ultimate creations are all happy ending. You perhaps wanted abit of spice along the way. You
seem to go for great aquired tastes. I have kept mine abit mild as that seems to be what my body is holding me back on. I am not out to try everything like you seem to be doing. I can try to enjoy the old stuff again even after its novelty has worn off, it seems to return its original luster and I still enjoy it.

Scotland? have you been there? Edinburgh reminds me of Milano but smaller. I have not explored the people there last summer as much. It was a quick trip through. What I loved were the highlands and anything.
They do have lots of rain and ruddy cheeks! It was a contrast to where I came from. I was most disturbed and entranced by Japan. I would experience the revolting and the wonderful. I was revolted by the urban sprawl and yet extremely touched by the hyperbolic effect of the temples' peace and serenity. I loved the peoples especially their youth.
I cannot stay anywhere for I have ties to my home to keep it maintained and there for me to work. It is a system apparently, I work so that I may travel. And I do need a home for work for everything is where I can find it, my tools, my stuff, etc.. My wife is there and that keeps me assured that the house and birds are in running order and not neglected.
I am grateful now for the freedom I have outside our marriage or "non"marriage. It seems better than I had thought at first when I perceived it, like most people would, as a catastrophe. Instead, it became an opportunity to change and do new things.

I also tell people that they could do things themselves. And take advantage of it as opposed to suffering. So, maybe your suffering propelled you to escape to Scotland but in reality, it is an excuse unfathomed yet by you? Just go with your urges, I guess. How can you possibly "live" there? What is wrong with a month vacation? You may spend it up and seek something else later. I guess that is why the earth
is round and the space is endless, so that we still have pavement under our mind and emotion's feet to trod upon.

I cannot fill that need of yours, you know it. But I enjoy your restlessness and see you go ZIP! I wouldn't see you again for awhile and get a postcard perhaps. I am sorry I cannot travel for now, but shall work on that prospect for this late fall and let you know.

Nothing is your last. May you have many wonderful journeys and vacations! Be in touch! I liked what you said some quote about God being partially self ignorant for that is what we are too. I would not worry about you, so don't worry. You are there always. Wherever. You are in the center of You and we are your projections. Dislike something, then that is your contrast! Your woof and warp at work. You need contrast
like God does. There would always be the terrible and the wonderful. So, here is your peace now. That is the Tao. My favorite technique in meditation is to take in all the suffering and all the wonderful and stir. All of it and hold this large inverted ceiling dome as dish.
Embrace it in gratitude for granting me the fullest for my boundless appetite. For we know and forgot how boundless we are. Why be sad?
Silly. We are there still in spite of ourselves. I do value my awareness! Probably the most precious conception I have. Existence! All this, all that is! Love your memories, Gianluca. You were never so entertained!

By the way, I am the eldest son in my family of 9. I think I have caused the most "trouble" of all the members. It is because I have dared.
Nowadays, I have accumulated obligations through my work, my home, etc., so am more winded down and use my canvases and flying miles (and internet) as my handy means of expression. I am home most of the time to myself, save for a few local friends. I tend to take advantage of the internet nowadays and it keeps me put within my studio. Get the idea?
Going to sign off now, got work to do!!!!

Kal

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

From: Kinkazzo
Sent: Mon 23 June, 2003, 18.47
To: Kal
Subject: No need to react...just mentally acknowledge

Thank you for this polychromous message of radiant insights. Do not bother to answer all my messages: just assure me that you read them, and I'll be contented.

A canvas of that size must require all of your attention! truly so.

Conversely, my "running this language office" and relevant linguistic expertise are going to terminate within the next 3-4 months: I will then undergo a major shift (once again) in my professional and private life. I'll shapeshift into something probably more common and marketable, as I move to Scotland for the next phase of my existence. We'll meet there for sure, and we'll tour the lakes, speak to Nessie and impersonate the Loch Lords of Olden Times... I have toured the world, Kal, I've been everywhere like Aasvero the Wandering Jew who refused to help Jesus and was cursed to wander the globe incessantly. I have been to every corner of the world, and more: by plane, boat, car, train, bike, horse, camel, elephant, carriage, foot... Do you understand? Do you even begin to grasp who I am?

Do you want me to start giving you my journeyman journals of impressions? No, better not: unicuique suum -- to each according to his measure. My impressions are my impressions, yours yours. Still, in Japan I claustrophobically panicked until I reached the ricepaper enclaves; on the Pacific islands, where I retreated impersonating Stevenson, I felt true paradise; in Thailand I prostrated along the Golden Buddha a sweated an intolerable heat... stop, stop...

>>"Would two days be more than enough? "<< surely not: two days, 48 hours, 2880 minutes? No good. More is more likely. Minds must converse, communion must be attained.
But yes, you've answered most of my questions so far. I'll posit more later...just in case you wish to answer them.

Yet, I dunno whether you've fully understood my personality and character. No big deal. I do not understand it myself; but I need to warn you. I am not "normal". And this non-normality cannot be transmitted as a feeling through cyberspace. I hate cyberspace, and I love it: the classic Freudian quandary --- love-hate relationships. Virtual space gives me claustrophobia (how recurrent this term is for me, doesn't it tell you something?)... I like to expand my feelings onto reality, or I soon get tired of the exercise. I'll probably diminish my electronic contact considerably as I move onto new horizons.

But you, Kal, you must keep my hand in yours and look at me with the eyes of an eternal friend. Do not mention "cyber friendship" to me, it is too degrading a word... "Friendship" is good enough. The meaning is all there to savour.
I do understand, though, what a relief electronic communication must've been for you. But we are not at the level of a Stephen Hawkins, are we? We can meet and "talk" in person. And I accept what you can give me, within the restrictions of such relationship.

Tender of you to describe my friend (and brother-in-law) as "friend/lover": you have incredible perceptiveness. No sexual overtones, though, never: remember Castor and Pollux, and there's my definition.

You spoke of another Hawkins, and the Mind's "I" --- I remember reading a special book on that subject, by Douglas R. Hofstadter & Daniel C. Dennett, which I read at university when doing my Master's --- here's the link.

Editorial reviews at the time said:
"Brilliant, shattering, mind-jolting, The Mind's I is a searching, probing nook--a cosmic journey of the mind--that goes deeply into the problem of self and self-consciousness as anything written in our time. From verbalizing chimpanzees to scientific speculations involving machines with souls, from the mesmerizing, maze-like fiction of Borges to the tantalizing, dreamlike fiction of Lem and Princess Ineffable, her circuits glowing read and gold, The Mind's I opens the mind to the Black Box of fantasy, to the windfalls of reflection, to new dimensions of exciting possibilities."
I found the book to be so.

The "I", my Eye, is the sign of an anouncing vision.

It is the eye of my inner witness which nothing escapes. It is the eye of my inner child which never abdicates to its own human dignity, Charles. It is also and above all the evidence that "the gaze through which we contemplate God and the gaze through which God contemplates me is one and the same" (to say it with Meister Eckhart).

The Eye, the I, is my symbolic cipher and the three-dimensional icon of my soul, wherever it poses its fluttering wings. My "I" is an extraordinary instrument for celebrating the immesurable beauty of the merciful universe. My inner Eye is the mirror of how I am inside: that you must comprehend and then survive. It is the most alive part of myself where the sky and the infinite are reflected. It is the place where two infinities meet, you and "I", or the conscience and the cosmos: unsettling, attractive, tremendous. It is above all through the Eye that love flows and changes our world, before the other senses. You are witness to that, Charles, with all your sanguine colours and extraordinary flights of photographic reality.
In ancient Greece seeing was believed the result of rays departing from the Eye and emanating towards the world and so they knew it: or rather, created it and continually recreated it.

And so, the eye, which sees the capacity of projecting the world and the firmament, has been symbolically assigned with a creative will of its own, desirous of joy, of the transmutation of all negativity into positivity.

Perhaps I should become a healer in my next "taking-of-shape". I'd make a bundle and not labour too much...

If I look at the disconcerting depth of the signals that arrive from society's different ways of living and behaving, from a world tending increasingly towards globality, I feel the importance of concentrating the idea-creating forces in order to respond to these signals, to these inalienable voices.

Just a "month's vacation" ?Ah, I do not think in those terms: for me, it's drastic change or nothing --- the drama of ineluctable transmigration! (sardonic smile). I create my own Cross of Change, and nail myself to it: what a joke for a Jew!

I do not believe that the changes are due to technological conquests, on the contrary, I believe that these voices respond to instances of deep change that come from the very body of humanity. The eye is a pre-eminent part of the body of any animal; it is "the mirror of the soul" often reiterated, it is the window through which the interior leans toward the exterior and vice-versa, it is the point of encounter between the microcosm and the macrocosm, between the ego and nature; and it is the pre-eminent symbol of knowledge. I have no big ass of knowledge, Charles: my windowsill leans out onto the scenario of nature, there every scenario is projected, like in a fantasy movie. In this combination of waves which go and come in constant flux, the vision will come about, I assure you; action and measure are appraised. Hence the ego is also a symbol, it becomes social, since it is from the eye that the ego speeds towards the other (into the Other), against the other, towards the other, towards the world thus becoming the world.

You see? So much just from you mentioning the Mind's "I"!

And your message this evening, as I am ready to leave my office, made me laugh "linguistically", whilst it pleased me incommensurably for its arousingly wise content. (talk about lexicon)

You are a little tired? I smile again. You are too much! Love you.

We must meet..There was a song or a poem that started thus...and ended with "eternity"... I forgot.

So I end my tirade now, Charles, and leave you some breathing space awhile. You give me a sign, when you wish for a reprise... I shall be there (goes the song).

Shalom aleichem, lehitraot bekarov!

Kinkazzo

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

From: Kal
Sent: Mon 23 June, 2003, 22.30
To: kinkazzo
Subject: The Eye (my third eye opened fully in 2000.)

It is also and above all the evidence that "the gaze through which we contemplate God and the gaze through which God contemplates me is one and the same" (to say it with Meister Eckhart).The Eye, the I, is my symbolic cipher and the three-dimensional icon of my soul, wherever it poses its fluttering wings. My "I" is an extraordinary instrument for celebrating the immesurable beauty of the merciful universe. My inner Eye is the mirror of how I am inside: that you must comprehend and then survive. It is the most alive part of myself where the sky and the infinite are reflected. It is the place where two infinities meet, you and "I", or the conscience and the cosmos: unsettling, attractive, tremendous.
Yes! Absolutely so. Amen! Let's do this show and tell and exchange the unexplored aspects of ourselves for one another til we run out. You ought to be somewhat contented for what you are able to grab. Yes, this hunger is apt, for it gets us going... but we need not complain, it is a nice ride after all. Are you developing insight into the formless or lessly formed realities?
Seems like good frontiers to me too. Maybe you want to upgrade your satellite dish to more exotic channels? I think so. We'd become fried cosmic tanned potatoes as opposed to the common couch potato.
That is more to my taste. Where did you go from where since A-star-is-X? Any discovery by chance or effort?
Isn't it dependent largely upon meditation and remote viewing?Soon, I will send you recent photos. I don't think we will be talking about photorealism as much, as I want to try some more mindbenders in my artistic realities on canvas. Thanks for sending me otherworldy art images. That is a start. Another artist I have a liking for somewhat is the scale of Al Held. I also like Dale Chihooly's dynamics and joy.

That is the kind of direction I wish to reinforce for myself. Before I was after the buck, but now that I take it for granted and it is predictable in sales, I can more relaxedly and freely experiment in the tune of Genesis' creation. I think my last parting was more of my seeking answers somewhere, and you just made me miserably hungry with no recourse or gratification. Somehow, I found some energy source and can relate with your energy better. I said you were so critical of me, maybe that was some made up excuse? I didn't know then what was bugging me exactly. Also I had no time to "make you happy or extatic" and I assume by now that you know it is a very personal odyssey, that what could one another do?!?! It is your suffering. I have mine and I sort of pace it into an art where it is somewhat tolerable. Call it angst perhaps. And it seems satiated with daily work appropriately pointed toward its goal object's attainment.

I hope you are finding many answers you had once sought. Our respective families' psychosis serve perhaps as a handy reminder that there is lots in this cosmos than our brains can accomodate for us. Get rid of fear, there is lots of space to play. Fear would be a good football field for your son to progressively overcome, then he can be eventually free of meds.

Did you wonder if our oscillations can disturb people around us? We'd have to teach others fear tips so that they can continue to bask in our presence. Huh? given that a thought?

For example, you are looking at a black hole in your living room for pleasure, your kids are in it in your vicinity, what can they do??? Are they ready for that space?
Help them then by daily doses of innoculation of tips of better rationality.
(ie. Postitivism, courage, adventure, etc are best taught early so that our children can lead levelheaded lives.) Our school curriculae are no where adequate to meet the accelerating cosmic revolution continuously unfolding. They had to make philosophy into a university elective! So late! 2000 years late!I now realize that you and are are a match for this love of cosmic consciousness and wisdom without the baloney.I gotta pace myself abit. Will read your recommended reading in my spare schedule, like an hour a day, daily. I get lots done this way.Maybe you ought to go to Scotland not til next spring? After the winter.

I can visit you in Italy in the fall. What is your plan definitely?

Kal

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

From: kal
Sent: Tue 17 June, 2003, 00.53
To: kinkajoule!
Subject: Kabbala

Kinkazzo,

Do you understand the Kabbala, the Tree of Life? Can you live without it? Is it the best design? What is it for? So far I have only come across nothing that explains it to me in a way that I can readily understand. Any Kabbala instructions for Dummies? Why are you Jewish instead of Milky Wayfarer? Why go back only some 5000 years? Or how old is this movement? Why are you glad you are Jewish as you say? I have
Jewish friends, but Judaism, and Christianity mean nothing to me in respect to the cosmic design so far. Help enlighten me if you can simplify the terms? I like Buddhism but do not feel the need to follow their severe discipline. I think there are shortcuts. I think best way for me is to say everything is "Perfect", then look beyond it and find my Self.

I will want to talk to you about my astral experience last spring but would want you to outline YOUR spiritual experiences out of this world form first with me, so I know where you are coming from as my audience.
Okay. There is some aspect about my experience that would be of great interest, I believe, especially with regard to Astar. I would also want your most current synopsis of Astar as I could not find a link to the pages any more. Also, pdf or html is better for me than zip files. I am not always able to open zip files so wasn't able to answer your question about A-star-is-X.

Did you find the eXstasy? If so, then why are you still hungry? Or just lonesome? How is Jan the sculptor doing. What were his contributions if any to the understanding of the Star? Where are you now? What is wrong with Bologna? It could be just your ass that is hurting? Your restlessness and having little to do with Bologna? Or was it that Scotland warmed a special spot in your heart already long ago? You know Scotland is ideal for you? Why Scotland of all places? Don't you like Ireland? Don't you like Amalfi? Tuscany? Scotland is a most windy place and I am not talking you out of it, but I was COLD last June there. Days are so delightfully long in summer but oooh, so short in the winter!
What is it?! Scotland? tell me more about it. I was there, and maybe I can understand you more. Don't you need a visa for Scotland? I like England alot, especially Cambridge or the southern shore. Much of the planet is beautiful to me. Italy included!

Your family happy where they are? They go along with your whims? Do they know that they create their happiness? Alot of people I know don't know this, that happiness is something you create, only. From within, Source, outwards, and everything reflects back your smile and energy. You agree with this, don't you? Happiness follows you everywhere, it is not in Scotland, it is right underneath your skin, you take it with you. If you forgot, you ain't going to find it elsewhere.

You wanted me to just acknowlege you. Why not I give some say and you give some back? Two way?

Arrivederci!
Kal

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

From: kal
Sent: Tue 24 June, 2003, 06.25
To: kinkazzo
Subject: Normal

Kink,

You not normal? Would you kindly take a few moments and recite a few examples of what constitutes a normal earthling? For some extra help, I have added some multiple choices for your selection process....

1. Beaver Cleaver
2. Ricky Martin
3, Gene Kelly
4. Dave Bowie
5. John Kennedy Jr.
6. Prince William
7. your local pizza delivery guy
8. Jay Leno
9. David Letterman
10 Jimmy Dean
11 Elvis Presley
12 Martin Luther
13 Norman Rockwell
14 Andrea Bocelli
15 Michael Jackson
16 Mickey Rooney
17 Fellini
18 Franco Zeffirelli
19 Pee Wee Herman
20 I am confused! Who am I to say who is normal?

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

From: kal
Sent: Tue 24 June, 2003, 14.57
To: kinkazzo
Subject: Such hyperboles!

Giorno kinky,

Hopefully, that old lifestyle could wear off and down? Most likely it is a test of concentration on anything, your new activities, your new life, with very little associations to a previous lifestyle, and you probably worked very well at it. Remember the part Chalko mentions in situations of psychic attack? CREATE a loving state in present time and little can do harm to you. Your wife included. You may have done this before, and I would employ that method. It is hard to teach an old dog tricks, dogs
like you and me, but it can be done. Send love to someone even if you perceive him to be a plainclothesman. Before you judge the Avatar courses, I found them good for closet cleanup, emotions and all.
Disregard it if that is out of the picture. One one of the courses back in 2000, I felt my third eye open, and it was painful like baby's teething, then bam, I got clairvoyant dreams that night. I enjoyed these new levels, came handy and found them to have a calming effect on my life.

As for your son, while he continues to heal, always a good father to son talk on philosophy subjects namely "fear" is very constructive. I mentioned I do that one on my wife. Sometimes, a simple point blank question like "What do you fear", and listen, don't talk til they run out of ideas, then you can ask again. Help them define who they really are (in terms of the "I" and being a formless awareness). Also teach him how the law of resistance works, how what we resist would persist.
Also how what we create mentally daily, the world shall reflect back to us. Most psychosis, I believe are a loss of some kind of lifetimes shielding where you see or witness all your past sins and fears, they come out of the woodwork! They caught up with you! That is my current theory. A friend in England and I talked about fear, and how we would best decide to flee into its face as a remedy. It takes practice. Then until one gets the hang of resolving many little fears, one gets the
idea, that he can work on gaining closure on each item. Acknowledge each fear and contemplate how, yes one was responsible for it or it would not have come up. We have too many movies, cultural daily situations, people's emotions that possibly trigger attacks by the very reason they resemble the past lives situations that we thought we escaped. Meds block this, but only temporarily. This fear is an exercise of courage and something to come into grips with. Even your son should read this.
He is mature enough to grasp concepts like this, and everyone knows fear. Toltec literature explores this too and most of the workshops are revolved around these things as dreams and managing them. Toltec seems to encourage playing with your several probable identities so that you discover how any move or emote you create has an observable effect.
Their workshops mainly teach and expand your awareness. They even have workshops encouraging one to change their clothes, name and everything for a week, in order to learn how people's reactions to you compeletely alters the reality enough for you to observe it and it would put your past masquerades into a fully CONSCIOUS format. All workshops attempt to increase your lucidity into yourself, and into societies' lies, control, pecking orders, etc.. These are my words....Taking a medicine though
they provide relief, we are painfully aware that the effects are only temporary and flimsy. I'd work on developing the karate on fear. Explore the reactions. For a psychotic, it would be very slow progress because mainly they are affected and all shookup, tired, uncertain, etc.. I use their good days for the constructive talk to help them reconstruct their infrastructure of great mental strength. The drawbacks of the illness is mainly the quality of care they give to their bodies as is needed for developing this core. I make sure we eat highly nutritious foods at home, and place raw foods at the top of the food pyramid and in full view in the fridge, fruits and vegetables at eye level instead of tucked away in compartments out of sight.

This is a long topic on psychosis but seemed to work for me. I give as much tidbits of wisdome appertaining to fear in so many different aspects til my wife has a good grasp of essentials. The episodes have diminished greatly, she no longer screams into the night. Like your son, it would be commonplace for her to dress formally and escape into the wee hours of A.M in darkness to the local beach. At one time, she lost her hearing aids, and vanished. I got into the car and found her and
asked her what the........ she had a flashlight and was down some dark road looking for something. She found her hearing aids. We had a discussion how she would not take them off outside the house. Many things need to be retaught, even washing the pans. As if one has gotten out of a coma and had to start all over again! 7 years of this, I see improvement. She used to be violent, but shows no traces of that to this
day. She is on NO MEDS! Not for 6 years, for she has refused. She refused psychiatry as well, so I am her psychiatric quack and making progress. Now we have many days of peace as she grew to trust me again.
(she used to lock herself in every room in the house that I had to remove the locks. I also had to throw out all sleeping pills and anything that might kill if OD'd. Psychotics have NO GOOD SENSE OF JUDGEMENT during their attacks and for most of them it is a 24 hour thing. Routine tasks are best taught and kept simple and they will do
them. Sometimes I use allowance money for rewards, and sometimes the peace becomes apparent that their morale rises and they notice the improvement. In early stages, everyone is out to get you.... stuff like that......your son is young, and I think no different from my wife's situation, it is the FEAR. It can be learnt to be overcome. It seems to be the core and basis of all difficulty in human life endeavors. Are we driven by fear or are we driven by the act of creating. Most people are driven, sadly, by the former. You can guess how many people I try to
pipe down on the topic of terrorism. That slogan is a copout! Should have been Operation Joy or something like that, mainly because we get what we place attention on. (Don't think of a cat!)
Well, the damage is done pretty bad this century, and would take some doing to heal it out. All lessons for humankind. People like you or I have a great grip on this and understand too easily.

This could be applied to your new life, by really being absorbed in your new creation in a way that many old creations wither for lack of sunlight. You are the sun. You elucidate everything in your path. May as well LOVE all you touch. It is pretty powerful and a forgotten art.

Hope this helps like a badgering reminder works. We all can forget. That is what friends are for.

I help students out alot by email with all their difficulties from fear of report card days to inability to hug daddy. Sometimes I tease in order to bring about an understanding. There are times when shit hits back. I get used to it as much as I can. Then a few days later, I get an "I'm Sorry" cyber greeting card, then all is well, and progress continues. Some run away to shun responsibility, they know I shall point out the achilles heel. They may not want to know right away, sooner or
later it shall catch up and they remember my kind words of advice.

Now, I got these murals. I am treating them somewhat like I would with fear. What would be once daunting, I stalk at the project by different approaches but must get anything done daily! I am going to go now and have a go at the murals.

Take care, Scotland sounds like a nice diversion for you. It is a nice country, a bit plain and friendly. Your mastery of English is so astounding, you would pass for a Scot. Maybe your son would heal quicker too.

Oh, I ain't so perfect either, I have some of my kinks too. Why do you think I buy Amazon books and log on to others' reviews? I dimly recall that is how I met you.

Thanks for the book links!
Kal

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

From: KAL
Sent: Wed June 25, 2003, 02.31
To: kinkazzo
Subject: En Sof

Kink,

I am very drawn to your En Sof page. I can only hope to read all those books listed. How much ecstasy did you manage to attain, Kink? I still haven't told you about my experience this early spring.

I dig those fractal art pieces, they are very appropriate on that page. That painting of the pillars, it is a coincidence because I went to that artist's group show in New York about 10 years ago and saw that original oil painting. Ingo Swann another aquaintance artist, a psychic who does remote viewing with the world governments, was there. Ingo once took me to his studio to see his extensive library and his magnificent art! He is shy and reclusive. Heard of Ingo?

I am observing your wild and magnificent duality at work. The ecstasy and the pain! I understand! You are of very high perceptic because you worked at it. You just like to be around others who can reflect somewhat your brilliance and acknowledge you often.

Keep me posted of your developments! Thanks for the En Sof link.
Kal

I DID CREATE A STAR: THE STAR-IS-X!
~CHAPTERS BY LOG DATE:
***check'em out in my Archive for a real mindblow!***
-click to view:
Chapters 1 to 6: 08/31/2003-09/06/2003
Chapters 7 to 10: 09/07/2003-09/13/2003
Chapters 11 to 26: 09/14/2003-09/20/2003
Chapters 27-28 and Index, etc: 09/21/2003-09/27/2003

UPSET ABOUT AESTHETICS

2005-06-07T22:22:00.000+02:00

...because the concept is dissolving.

How can I define aesthetics without thinking about the BEAUTY OF THE UNIVERSE?
If the Universe is the cornerstone of conceptual definition, then anything else loses meaning...
I am upset about this.
I am indeed upset about the Beauty of the Universe!
Because nothing can compare
Nothing
The Nothingness of Aesthetics
The supreme beauty of indefiniteness. Since Beauty cannot be defined.
Not by humans, surely.

In philosophy, aesthetics is the study of beauty and taste, whether in the form of the comic, the tragic or the sublime. Traditionally, aesthetics has often been part of other philosophical pursuits, like the investigation of epistemology or ethics. However, it started to come into its own under Kant who saw aesthetics as a unitary and self-sufficient type of human experience.

If you go to my other blogs, you'll find a plethora of discourses about epistemology, philosophical pursuits, Kant and company. OK? Good.

Unfortunately, aesthetics is one of those concepts which is not easily broken down into simpler ideas. In general, when we speak of something that creates an aesthetic experience, we are usually talking about some form of art, but ultimately it can be anything which arouses sensual responses - either positive or negative.

Even art does not necessarily create an aesthetic experience. When we look at a painting in an effort to determine how much we can sell it for, we are not viewing it aesthetically.

Am I being funny?

Those studying aesthetics seek to understand, for example, why some things arouse positive reactions whereas others arouse more negative feelings. The very question of how and why aesthetic experiences are created is also a subject of aesthetics. The word derives from the Greek aisthetikos, which means "of sense perception."

I do sense a perception!
I perceive my total incapacity in sensing aesthetics.

Aesthetics also leads us to a variety of other issues regarding politics, morality, and more. For example, some have argued that an important component of the aesthetic experience is the desire for political action - thus, "good" art is that which gets us to try and improve society. With regards to morality, it has often been argued that certain images or ideas are inherently immoral and, hence, do not create a valid aesthetic experience. Anything with a strong sexual content has often been included in such a category, but many political leaders have also included material which does not encourage people to follow the dictates of the state.

Does this make you laugh? No?
Well, it should.

You know, politics, sexuality, immoral ideas and images...
Now, now, now - don't be prudish though. Aesthetics celebrate the beauty of perfection.
So, the perfection of a human body too.
No?
The human body is not perfect?
Tsk, tsk...

So, anyway, aesthetics is a wide concept, open to further definition and refinement. It adapts with the societal understanding of beauty, and if beauty disappears, aesthetics dissolves...

Ciao

UPSET ABOUT TIME

2005-06-06T12:15:00.000+02:00

...or lack thereof.

Or too much of it, wasted
Or the idleness of time
Or the boredom of timelessness
Or timing time and the upsetting function of clocks
Or being in time and not being
Or abusing & disabusing time
Or finding time...
...for myself and others
Or the ultimate time
Or the limitless boundaries of time
Or time and the universe, and everything...or else

The Ultimate Nature of the Universe

Endo-physics.
Like the term?

Now, listen to this: I got it from Above... ohoooooooo! [harps and angels singing in background]

The concept of endo-physics was introduced in the context of self-reference in quantum physics and artificial intelligence (AI) research.

Now, regarding quantum physics, it implicitly relies on something existing outer to itself, namely, the existence of an observer related to consciousness. In order to evaluate the relation of consciousness to (quantum) physics, it is necessary to recognise the fact that physical behaviour follows the principle of least action (action principle) which requires the behaviour to be directed towards the physical equilibrium.

Since biology follows a principle which acts against the physical principle, attempting to preserve the distance from physical equilibrium, and consciousness allegedly develops only in biological organism (at least in the observer concept of quantum physics), the observer lives on an ontologically different level from the physical realm.

With it so far?

The epistemological structure of the observer-observed relation contains a two-levelled ontological structure. Regarding AI, it relies to “creators” of hardware and software, therefore its epistemology is that of the deistic materialism, i.e. another ontologically two-levelled structure.

Self-modification, the concept closely related to endophysics, is characteristic on a biological and/or psychological level of ontology. Therefore, it is an important recognition that self-governing systems follow developmental paths different from physical entities.

Endo-physics, putting the observer into a physical context, compresses the two-levelled ontological structure into a monistic ontology and therefore creates epistemic paradoxes with Klein-bottle structures. Nevertheless, when we are aware that there is an at least two-levelled ontology behind the concept of endophysics, it is easy to remove certain types of paradox epistemic structures like Klein-bottles since self-reference becomes simply reference of one existential level to another.

It was shown already by Aristotle that the psyche appears to be responsible for the “measuring” and “the counting” of (physical) motions and thus, for the coming into being and the genesis of chronos at the human level as a psychological phenomenon with ontological pretensions.

Too complicate a notion for you?
Hmmm...

This notion is close to the one expressed in Boltzmann’s H-theorem that entropy is generated only in measurements. Recognising the two(or three)-levelled ontology (physical-biological-noetic) behind the endo-physical concept, it is easy to escape from the epistemic paradoxes of endo-physics. Self-reference in a physicalist epistemology should form a Klein-bottle structure and Klein-bottles cannot be factually built. In a two(or three)-levelled ontology observer-containing modelling requires only the reference of the higher (cognising) ontological level to the lower (physical) level and so the epistemic structure is a simple mapping relation. Therefore the claim that a new ontology may be necessary is true already at the introduction of the concept of endo-physics.

The physical view – in contrast to the endo-physical view - requires the ignorance of human (and, in general, non-physical) views. At the same time it is a materialistic, inanimate view, and therefore it is bound to some finite relations between inanimate systems.

The physical view is outer in comparison to our internal view, but it is internal within the materialistic systems of relations. Apparently, while it expresses an unnatural, non-realisable view, it ignores the connection to the source of genuine activity of the material world.

The endo-physical view relies on an internal, psychological, mental or biological view. The concept of endophysics is an ancient one. Spinoza recognised that an internal being can grasp the nature of the parts if it moves not from the part to the whole but from the whole to the part. Other philosphers suggested that an internal being may recognise the nature of the whole by studying the most general relations, which are the ultimate, ontological principles.

To recognise the ultimate (exo-cosmic) view, we should comprehend the Universe as a whole.

Do we now?

There is more to reality than that meets the eye.
The ultimate view regards the Universe as a unified organisation of three ultimate realities: they are the realms of the material (physical), the emotional (biological) and the thought-like (psychological) existents. Therefore, the ultimate view is closely related to the recently analysed three ultimate principles: that of physics, biology and psychology. It points out that matter is a manifestation of the material principle, which is the action-principle of physics.

The timelessness of the Universe

The Universe when defined as an all-inclusive notion is time-inclusive, too.

In this view time is an internal part of the Universe, and the Universe-as-a-whole is living behind the temporal realms, therefore, in timelessness.

Apparently, the realm of the 3+1 dimensions is related to thermodynamics. Unfortunately, the law of entropy development is not proven for all systems, especially not when gravitational, electromagnetic, weak, strong and other (possibly biological) interactions play a significant role. It is already indicated that some interactions may be related to compactification of higher dimensions. Since biology is able to govern behaviour, biology is able to govern physics. We can expect that the biological principle, representing a subtle, biological interaction, may belong to some higher-than-physical dimension and/or to the ultimate, logical dimension, which is behind the finite spaces.

Higher and ultimate dimensions and behaviour

It is well known that the spatio-temporal characteristics of the so-called "extraordinary/altered" states of consciousness may profoundly differ from our everyday experience.

To grasp the basic structure of these "anomalous/peculiar" space-times, it seems to be necessary to go beyond the mathematical framework offered by physics. The proper understanding of such "uncanny" space-times was demonstrated to require highly abstract geometrical concepts like projective planes over finite (Galois) fields, and/or Cremona transformations.

Moreover, not only the nature of a mental state seems to be related to a special mathematical space, but it is frequently reported that travel between the different spaces and times is possible by will. The question arises as which kind of factor regulates the 3+1 and higher dimensions. In the context that physics is based on the ultimate principle of least action, which is related somehow on a virtual transparency of the 3+1 dimensional space as a whole, we raise up the possibility that the higher dimensions are more related to the biological and spiritual principles besides of the physical principle.

On the Nature of the Ultimate Dimension

Analysing the concept of “soul” it is found that in some ancient high culture the soul is conceptualised as the ultimate driving factor of life. The Dictionary determines the concept of the soul as the following: “1. concept the soul is the hypothesised, more-or-less material ultimate carrier of life phenomena, which departs the body at the moment of death”. At the same time, a closer scrutiny reveals that this allegedly “primitive” conceptualisation is related to the deepest scientific concept of mankind, which is the concept of “first principles”. It seems that soul appeared as a (first) principle at the special kind of animism of ancient Greek philosophers.

Scientific research attempts to reveal facts and deeper relations.
Science begins when we search the laws behind the phenomena.
Laws may be regarded as deeper level relations behind the immediate, brute facts.

Although laws help us to explain and predict phenomena, they may be regarded as being only the first steps on the way to find the most clear and most transparent truth possible, which is the ultimate aim of science.
Therefore, the real basis of science is related to the laws behind the laws, and to find the ultimate law which is able to explain all the laws intermediate between empirical facts and mental understanding.

Now the concept that developed the notion of ultimate and universal laws, the first principles, may be regarded as the highest point of scientific conceptualisation. Therefore, soul as a universal first principle, as an ontological principle is a scientifically remarkable concept from which one can expect fundamental insights into the Nature.

The action principle of physics is a universal and ultimate principle, an arche. Therefore, the materialised universe may be regarded as governed by a primary factor, the arche.

In this way time seems to be a secondary attribute of the primordial, timeless reality. The ultimate principles act in the logical dimension, from “above” time and space, therefore they may transcend space and time. The archi may act as primary potentials, or pre-existent realities, pre-realities. Being pre-material, their action is not a solidified material action. Being pre-time existents, they may exert integral organisational influence and determine the path through which the material process should be realised.

The biological principle is indicated to act behind (or before?) any space and time, in the ultimate reality. In this context the psychic reports on some mathematical details of higher spaces may reveal us the fact that the higher spaces are under a (partial or dominant) psychic control, and so the phenomena are not governed by physics alone, but also and (perhaps prominently) by biology. In these contexts the physics of higher spaces may be complemented by the ultimate principle of biology.

The life principle

In the biological context the behaviour is governed by the life-principle: “Living systems are characterised by the fundamental and general law, telling that the living system exerts work against the realisation of the equilibrium…changing the internal conditions, therefore its own structure. If the living system is effected to an outer influence and it exerts a work, this work has to modify the effect of the outer influence in order to increase the ability of the system to work.” The ultimate principle of biology is formulated by biologist Ervin Bauer in the following way: “The living and only the living systems are never in equilibrium, and they continuously work supplied by their free energy content against the realisation of the equilibrium which should set up in the same outer conditions by the laws of physics and chemistry”.

Regarding the fact that the biological principle is able to govern the behaviour, physical causation is recognised to be open towards the ultimate dimension. This fact makes the regulation of an organisation possible in an extremely transparent manner. The extreme richness and complexity of biological organisation requires the presence of an integral, simultaneous, but also a regulative mechanism potentially infinitely extended in time. This type of transparency is not available in the 3+1 dimension since material objects represent a kind of shielding. Interestingly, the higher dimensions offer a kind of transparency unprecendented within the 3+1 material dimensions. Moreover, the higher and the ultimate dimensions carry additional degrees of freedom and related additional information which may be important at the organisational activities.

Feel like yawning? Nah, keep going...

The Ultimate Cosmic Evolution

The ultimate view of the Universe is in a close relation with the timeless character of our thoughts and emotions.

The aim to give our life a meaning exerts important influence on our life as a whole, which does not pass with the end of our earthly life.

We should not regard as true the widespread materialist view that our life is born from inanimate matter, and we will return to inanimate matter (from dust to dust), into the complete annihilation.

It is not true that we should conceive our life in a sport language that before our birth the game had a state 0:0, during our life the state is 1:0, and after our life it is 1:1, and this is completely the same state as before our birth.
This view is not true because the fact of our life as a whole will not become invalid by our death.

The fact of our death cannot change the validity of the fact that we had a life.

Our life is a member of a larger context and forms a part of it.
One part of the higher contexts concerning our life is the survival of the aim of our life, a maintenance and further development of the values which were important to our life.
This part of our life is related to our culture. The other part of the higher contexts of our life is directly related to the Universe as a whole. This is because our thoughts and emotions are not extended in space and time (they become extended in these dimensions only through their travel to our outer world). Therefore they have the same nature as the Universe as a whole, and so our thoughts and emotions are added to the Universe as a whole in the logical field of the Universe.

This logical field is a reason-full natural system and has a timeless nature.
Our thoughts and emotions may gain directly cosmic significance in the extent as they connect to the logical and reason-full, real order of the Universe. The thoughts and emotions born by our life may enter directly to the timeless Universe and there their existence may gain a meaning and significance in a logical form, in a timeless essence.

Logic is more than individual consciousness – it is a potential of infinite, relevant and true consciousness and creativity. Logic is the cosmic network of the primal, pre-material, biological and psychological existents. In so far as our thoughts and emotions carry a meaning that ignores the meaning and destination of the Universe, this timelessness will have a different context and significance than the thoughts and emotions helping the realisation of the destination of the Universe.

Is it logical?

Since we were able to obtain an insight into the life centre of the Universe when we recognised the three archi, we have a possibility to consider a not yet suspected cosmic connection of Eternity and terrestrial life. If the Universe has a principal nature, and the principles have a spiritual, mental, universal, cosmic nature above space and time, the principles should live also above space and time, and so they extend to time as a whole.

Now we should face with the question: how could we conceive the destination of the Universe in a timeless context? If any evolution should occur in time, and the nature of the Universe is timeless, does not this fact involve that the Universe is destined to be forever changeless? And will not an eternal changelessness connected necessarily with a meaninglessness – since eternal invariability is interpreted in a material view as a state in which nothing to do?

In contrary to this possible objection, if our thoughts and emotions born by our life add continuously to the logical network of the Universe, than the Universe is necessarily destined to a kind of evolution. This evolution is an interesting, extraordinary and unsuspected one. This evolution starts from realms of time and arrives to the realm of timelessness and completes its ultimate meaning in timelessness.

One can clearly observe that with the help of life, timelessness obtains a possibility to evolve. But what is the nature of the time in which timelessness evolve? This ultimate time should be different from our everyday, material-contexted time. More exactly, we live our everyday life also in timelessness through our thoughts and emotions, but this fact did not become realised, and it is a general view that we live our life exclusively in material-contexted time.

Aristotle, following Plato, connected time to the Cosmic Soul and conceived of it as an “image of eternity”, in relation to the Divine Nous and the “Kosmos Noetos”. At the same time, peak-experiences, near-death experiences show that we can live during our life also with the abilities offered by higher dimensions and the ultimate reality. The ultimate view of time shows that we can live our life in its full scope when we live with the power of our ultimate reason.

How could we conceive the time in which timelessness evolve?
If we imagine the three archi forming an organic, alive whole as three red threads running from infinity to infinity, then these three threads may develop in the reason-full completion of the Universe.

When we have to speak on the ultimate scene we should apply some parable which is closer to the material view. With the help of a parable, in which three red threads represent the three archi, the evolution in the timeless sphere may be imagined as a fourth thread developing above and around these already existing three threads, unifying them as a metaphysical current circuit. And since this new thread is born and developing in the principal level, its evolution does not met with any constraint.

In the principal level life is a full, absolute intensity, an unconstrained reality. Therefore, all newborn existent having principal significance has to build in into the principal existence. Finite, limited, bordered existence and infinite existence forms a dynamic dyad.

Unlimited existence knows everything, but still incomplete since it misses finiteness. Unlimited principal existence can realise everything, every wish, desire, aim immediately, therefore there can be no space and no time at this level of existence. But because unlimited infinite existence still misses finiteness, its completion needs the realisation of finiteness. Finiteness knows something more about existence, because it is coupled with the concept of stake. In finiteness one can comprise something which is unavailable in infinity: it is selection, purification, a game which goes for life and death, a game in which everything is concentrated in a stake.

Life's Infinity

The ultimate concentration of infinity in finiteness is called life, the ultimate stake. Therefore, when our life is at risk, it is the concentrated infinity which is at risk, which is under the attack in the finite existence. The dynamics of finiteness and infinity is paralleled in the dynamics of timely and timeless existence.

Ahaa, you see, we're back to square one! Time and timelessness...

Material reality is not a separate, isolated subset of existence, which is closed in itself. Material reality is related with the realities of life and reason. Material reality forms a complete reality with the realities of life and reason. This complete reality has a principal, spiritual nature. In this way it is necessary that our thoughts and emotions should form a communicating unity with each other and the material reality. In this way, the destination of the Universe requires a development, an evolution in a more full sense, the time of which is the logical time, the time of reason, the order of the completion of the reason-full, genuine, cosmic meaning.

Concluding:
An ultimate, integral cosmology is indicated here in which the principles of biology (and psychology) should be also implemented besides the physical principle. The evolution of the Universe occurs in the logical time of Eternity. We can contact Eternity if we are able to connect our emotions and thoughts into the reason-full, logical order of the Universe.

There is no time without reality.

Reality is founded ultimately on the ontological levels.

The interaction of the ontological levels creates the logical time of Eternity.

The interesting question is how the ontological principles are built up from the logical principles. Pythagoras expressed the view that physical reality is generated from the realms of mathematics. Today, as we understand it, there is a gap between the mathematical (logical) and physical (material) levels of existence. This gap connects the realms of mathematics and physics, infinity and finiteness, being and knowledge.

How shall we call this gap?

Uhm...Er...And that's another story!

UPSET ABOUT LOVE

2005-06-05T21:37:00.000+02:00

Love is in the air...

Tra-la-llaa-lala-laaaaa!

Genuine love is SELFISHNESS!
Did you know that?
Love doesn't mean to sacrifice yoursef for others. Absolutely NOT!
It is the exact opposite. It is the most selfish experience possible, in the true sense of the term: it benefits your life in a way that involves no sacrifice of others to yourself or of yourself to others.

To love a person is selfish because it means that you value that particular person, that he or she makes your life better, that he or she is an intense source of joy--to you.

A "disinterested" love is a contradiction in terms. One cannot be neutral to that which one values. The time, effort and money you spend on behalf of someone you love are not sacrifices, but actions taken because his or her happiness is crucially important to your own. Such actions would constitute sacrifices only if they were done for a stranger--or for an enemy.

Those who argue that love demands self-denial must hold the bizarre belief that it makes no personal difference whether your loved one is healthy or sick, feels pleasure or pain, is alive or dead.

It is regularly asserted that love should be unconditional, and that we should "love everyone as a brother." We see this view advocated by the "non-judgmental" grade-school teacher who tells his class that whoever brings a Valentine's Day card for one student must bring cards for everyone. We see it in the appalling dictum of "Hate the sin, but love the sinner"--which would have us condemn death camps but send Hitler a box of Godiva chocolates. Most people would agree that having sex with a person one despises is debased. Yet somehow, when the same underlying idea is applied to love, people consider it noble.

Love is far too precious to be offered indiscriminately.
It is above all in the area of love that egalitarianism ought to be repudiated.
Love represents an exalted exchange--a spiritual exchange--between two people, for the purpose of mutual benefit.

You love someone because he or she is a value--a selfish value to you, as determined by your standards--just as you are a value to him or her.

It is the view that you ought to be given love unconditionally--the view that you do not deserve it any more than some random bum, the view that it is not a response to anything particular in you, the view that it is causeless--which exemplifies the most ignoble conception of this sublime experience.

The nature of love places certain demands on those who wish to enjoy it.
You must regard yourself as worthy of being loved.
Those who expect to be loved, not because they offer some positive value, but because they don't-- i.e., those who demand love as altruistic duty-- are parasites. Someone who says "Love me just because I need it" seeks an unearned spiritual value--in the same way that a thief seeks unearned wealth.

AGREE?

UPSET ABOUT GENIUS

2005-06-04T23:35:00.000+02:00

I feel the genius in me: it wants to get out, just like the birth of Athena from Zeus' head...

Freakin' nuts

Opening my brain with a scalpel and getting the genius out!
It's there,I know it.
I'm sure.
I AM A GENIUS
No doubt about it.

So, how come I cannot create?????????????????
Where is my creativeness, uh?
What have I produced so far that evidences the soaring splendour of my genius?
It all hidden, I tell you.
It's all still in the foetal status, ready to explode and illuminate the world with the immensity of its genial beauty...

Nonsense.
My GENIUS thrives incognito.
Yes siree, I am an incognito genius. My brain is of such excellence, that it cannot contain itself and express openly.

The entrails of my sympathetic loquaciousness indicate the brightness of a genius' personality - although his productive approach defies the normal channels of evidence.

Well, well... What else is there to say?
A genius' work is never done.
Mine was never, and never is nor will.
Content with its state of geniality, ingenuousness, geniusly.

So, I'm taking stock.
Stocktaking.
Taking stock is about genius, because it is how genius works. As Samuel Johnson said, genius is nothing more than knowing the use of tools, but there must be tools for it to use. A man who has spent all his life in one room will give a poor account of what's in another room. Ralph Waldo Emerson pointed out how ideas that seem like the work of genius haunt us with the memory of our own ideas we have discarded. "In every work of genius we recognize our own rejected thoughts, and they come back to us with a certain alienated majesty," he wrote. Emerson went on to recognize that "genius is the power to labor better." Remember that old saying by Tom Edison that genius is 1% inspiration and 99% perspiration.

Nathaniel Hawthorne recognized the timelessness of genius by writing, "Genius melts many ages into one, and thus effects something permanent... it is but the newspaper of a century, or perhaps of a hundred centuries" (c. 1846). It is commonly believed that geniuses excel other men and women in their power to sustain the attention of the masses, but I believe their genius lies in making them attentive. Once ideas are in place, they can be spun into gold; their glitter mesmerizes.

Where is my gold?

Can any of these quotes arouse MY genius?
Pleeeeeease!

Doing easily what others find it difficult is talent; doing what is impossible for talent is genius.
Author: Henri-Frederic Amiel

There is no great genius without a mixture of madness. [Lat., Nullum magnum ingenium sine mixtura dementia.]
Author: Aristotle

As diamond cuts diamond, and one hone smooths a second, all the parts of intellect are whetstones to each other; and genius, which is but the result of their mutual sharpening, is character too.
Author: Cyrus Augustus Bartol

Genius is only patience. [Fr., Le Genie, c'est la patience.]
Author: George-Louis Leclerc de Buffon
I have been patient enough!

Genius . . . means the transcendent capacity of taking trouble.
Author: Thomas Carlyle

Patience is a necessary ingredient of genius.
Author: Benjamin Disraeli
Ok, ok, let's not repeat ourselves!

Fortune has rarely condescended to be the companion of genius.
Author: Isaac D'Israeli

Many men of genius must arise before a particular man of genius can appear.
Author: Isaac D'Israeli

To think, and to feel, constitute the two grand divisions of men of genius--the men of reasoning and the men of imagination.
Author: Isaac D'Israeli

Philosophy becomes poetry, and science imagination, in the enthusiasm of genius.
Author: Isaac D'Israeli

Every work of Genius is tinctured by the feelings, and often originates in the events of times.
Author: Isaac D'Israeli

But genius must be born, and never can be taught.
Author: John Dryden
I was born a genius, I tell you!

Genius is one percent inspiration and ninety-nine percent perspiration.
Author: John Dryden
We said this already...

Any fool can make things bigger, more complex, and more violent. It takes a touch of genius--and a lot of courage--to move in the opposite direction.
Author: John Dryden

Any intelligent fool can make things bigger and more complex. . . . It takes a touch of genius--and a lot of courage to move in the opposite direction.
Author: John Dryden

When Nature has work to be done, she create a genius to do it.
Author: Ralph Waldo Emerson
Ha, ha, ha, hahaha!

The hearing ear is always found close to the speaking tongue; and no genius can long or often utter anything which is not invited and gladly entertained by men around him.
Author: Ralph Waldo Emerson

Vivutur ingenio, that damn'd motto there Seduced me first to me a wicked player. Author: George Farquhar

Genius and its rewards are briefly told: A liberal nature and a niggard doom, A difficult journey to a splendid tomb.
Author: John Forster

Genius is the power of lighting one's own fire.
Author: John Forster
Now, this is a good one!

The first and last thing required of genius is the love of truth. [Ger., Das erste und letzte, was vom Genie gefordert wird, ist Wahreits-Liebe.]
Author: Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

Here lies our good Edmund, whose genius was such We scarcely can praise it or blame it too much; Who, born for the universe, narrow'd his mind, And to party gave up what was meant for mankind.
Author: Oliver Goldsmith

Perhaps, moreover, he whose genius appears deepest and truest excels his fellows in nothing save the knack of expression; he throws out occasionally a lucky hint at truths of which every human soul is profoundly though unutterably conscious.
Author: Nathaniel Hawthorne

Genius, like humanity, rusts for want of use.
Author: William Hazlitt
I'm all rusted up...

Nature is the master of talents; genius is the master of nature. - Josiah Gilbert Holland (used pseudonym Timothy Titcomb),
Author: Josiah Gilbert Holland (used pseudonym Timothy Titcomb)

Genius is intensity. The man who gets anything worth having is the man who goes after his object as a bulldog goes after a cat - with every fiber in him tense with eagerness and determination.
Author: C. Holman
I feel like a rottweiler

Adversity reveals genius, prosperity conceals it.
Author: Horace

Everyone is born with genius, but most people only keep it a few minutes.
Author: Edgard Varese
Hey, where's mine gone?

Genius may have its limitations, but stupidity is not thus handicapped.
Author: Elbert Hubbard

There's a fine line between genius and insanity. I have erased this line.
Author: Oscar Lavant
My line was never there

The difference between genius and stupidity is that genius has its limits.
Author: Anonymous
Oh, I love this one!

But the fact that some geniuses were laughed at does not imply that all who are laughed at are geniuses. They laughed at Columbus, they laughed at Fulton, they laughed at the Wright brothers. But they also laughed at Bozo the Clown.
Author: Carl Sagan

Nobody in the game of football should be called a genius. A genius is somebody like Norman Einstein.
Author: Joe Theisman

The public is wonderfully tolerant. It forgives everything except genius.
Author: Oscar Wilde

Any intelligent fool can make things bigger, more complex, and more violent. It takes a touch of genius - and a lot of courage - to move in the opposite direction.
Author: E. F. Schumacher

Genius hath electric power which earth can never tame.
Author: Lydia M Child

Great spirits have always encountered violent opposition from mediocre minds.
Author: Albert Einstein
He should know

The genius of you Americans is that you never make clear-cut stupid moves, only complicated stupid moves which make us wonder at the possibility that there may be something to them which we are missing.
Author: Gamal Abdel Nasser
Wow, a caption to American history!

One of the strongest characteristics of genius is the power of lighting its own fire.
Author: John Watson Foster
He said this already...scroll up

Sometimes men come by the name of genius in the same way that certain insects come by the name of centipede--not because they have a hundred feet, but because most people can't count above fourteen.
Author: G. C. Lichtenberg

Genius is an African who dreams up snow.
Author: Vladimir Nabokov
Good one

True genius sees with the eyes of a child and thinks with the brain of a genii.
Author: Puzant Kevork Thomajan

Time, place, and action may with pains be wrought, But Genius must be born; and never can be taught.
Author: John Dryden

Genius is the ability to act rightly without precedent--the power to do the right thing the first time.
Author: Elbert Hubbard

Genius begins great works; labor alone finishes them.
Author: Joseph Joubert

Genius is an infinite capacity for taking life by the scruff of the neck.
Author: Christopher Quill

In every work of genius we recognise our own rejected thoughts; they come back to us with a certain alienated majesty.
Author: Ralph Waldo Emerson

Genius does what it must, and talent does what it can.
Author: Edward G. Bulwer-lytton

It is the privilege of genius that to it life never grows commonplace as to the rest of us.
Author: James Russell Lowell

UPSET ABOUT BOOKS

2005-06-03T22:01:00.000+02:00

Can't find a damned decent book to read
Always the same depressing garbage
Writers writing like they must at all costs produce a masterpiece of a DIFFERENT kind
And it's g-a-r-b-a-g-e of the primest quality
Because there's no genius
No art
No craft
No illumination
No spark of creativeness
Just utter rubbish
Totally
Dust for the dustman
Shit for the shitman
Crapping on pages
A collection of idiocies
Boring of a deathly boredom
Arid and useless
Dialogues like being on Mars
Zombielike thoughts
Indecent concepts...indecent for the mind and for the body
Indecent writing, that is
The indecency of writing garbage
They should be condemned to perpetual silence
Jailed in a library and forced to read classics for eternity
Oh the need for beauty!
Oh the need for art!
Literature help me!
Buuuuaaahhh...

Everyone can undoubtedly write meaningful phrases.
Most of us do so to please ourselves.
Some, with a modicum of planning and care, manage to please others.
Few are capable of being creative and joining the literati because that requires painstaking work and a devotion to the method formed by a lifetime of conspicuous attention to minor details and nebulous, inexpressive things.

To understand this better, and to gain success, not necessarily financial, at writing, one needs to delve into motivations, the psychological reasons behind the desire to inscribe memorable narratives.

Artistic creativity, whether painting, sculpting, composing music or crocheting a pastoral tapestry with billions of hummingbird feathers, develops through four primordial states of consciousness in random order.

Every artist experiences them and experiments with how they affect him or her. It does not seem to matter which comes first or which predominates.
They are called

inspiration,

illumination,

incubation

and

modification.

No work of art ever reaches fruition without its progenitor undergoing all four of these conditional factors.

They are the mind enhancers that transform vision to product, the self-consuming guides of intellect that govern the change from thought to deed.

Inspiration is, of course, self explanatory for the most part.
It is that portion of ourselves which formulates desire and need, the coveting of a precious concept, the cradling of a newborn thought as suggested by a real or imaginary stimulus.

No original work of art is uninspired, not even the paintings of Cy Twombly or the seemingly incoherent rambling of mad poets.

My ramblings.

Something always triggers the imagination to search the void of our brains for a minuscule, fresh seed of thought, hopefully one that will respond and grow if we tailor its environment.

Illumination recognizes worthiness and seeks the ways and means of aiding the inspiration with that which will foster development. Sometimes it occurs before an inspirational idea, preparing the mind for an as yet to be conceived solution. It is often compared to the kindling of a flame where a concept, perhaps a discarded one, is given new life by the reasoning process.

Kindling MY flame.

There is a kind of closed circuit feedback arrangement between this brightening of the playing field and that which inspired the game, one that makes writers cross out words or tear up pages and replace them with others.
Illumination shines a spotlight on the tiny idea and throws it into the central circus ring for the audience of the mind, completely in the dark, to see and appreciate.

My mind appreciates, but cannot find ideas...

Incubation is that part of ourselves that questions everything, the mental detective that seeks to disprove or alienate the idea to such an extent that we shelve it for another time or forget it entirely.
Yet, if the seed survives this withering inquisition, it automatically matures with sufficient strength to endure manipulation, testing and even harsh, unyielding critiques. If the idea is good enough, it will pass. Otherwise, it will die as it should.
It is often the impetus that forces change, the cause that muscles alterations so that the final product is wholly viewable to its conceiver. Any artist who claims not to have considered revising his work is deluding himself.
It always happens.
Mozart and Michelangelo may seem to have created their works with rapidity in an endless flow of effortlessness, according to their observers, but their own words reveal the ponderous longevity of their thinking, however brief it may appear to us.

The final condition is modification, usually the last to surface realistically but not necessarily the culminating act. Change can be considered before any of the others, but because it affects the product via the senses, it seems to dwell at the end.
Most artworks endure alteration.
I would be wrong to insist that they all do because that would deny genius.
Nevertheless, even the greatest amongst us produce revised presentations since hindsight is more prevailing than foresight.
The medium is affected rather directly, because sculptors cannot add marble nor can editors reedit published material.

Get it?
Get it?

JUST UPSET

2005-06-02T21:06:00.000+02:00

Freakin'out, I am, yeah!
Oh yeah, folks-- need to vent my stupidity and dismay.

Ohoooooo ---ahaaaaaaa, let it all out, come on, all OUT

In the beginning it was the Word
What damned Word was that?
A 4-letter Word???

Requiescat in pacem
Amen

What the f....?
Hey, free association---

Anger
Lepidopter
cactus
desert
anger
thorn
worn
shorn
corn
callous
fallous
tepid
fetid
rancid
pundit
sunlit
fuckit
done it
left it
shat it
Mama-a-a-a-a-a-a-aaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaa!!!!!!!!!!!!

caca
merde
poopoo
chooo chooooo
tattoo
moooo
cow
sow
tow
car
wreck
amputation
mutilation
titillation
separation
constipation
fellatio
carpatia
carp
tarpaulin
maudlin
fellahiin
jin
pixie
trixie
dixie
fixit
closeit
finishit
demolishit
destroy
alloy
junction
function
funk
fcuk
uk
usa
mama-a-a-a-a-a-a-aaaaaaaaaaaa!!!! HELP
AIDA
FAIDA
AID
AIDS
SAID
MAID
RAID
terror
horror
furor
fury
anger
RAGE

Have you noticed the anagram? A-N-G-E-R = R-A-G-E minus "N"
ragen
enraged
deranged
arranged
ragenda
geranda
and rage
end rega
RAGE
RAGE
RRRRRRAGE
gimme more...

UPSET ABOUT ANGER AND RAGE

2005-06-01T12:00:00.000+02:00

One of the strongest feelings to cope with, is anger.

Anger was once associated with rage. Rage is anger out of control. Rage is an abusive and destructive control behaviour. When the anger I'm releasing is connected with the need to have control over the person I'm angry with, I know I'm going into rage.

The need to control abusively — rage — stems from the fears of feeling helpless, controlled, and injured.
Anger is a secondary emotion.
By secondary, I mean that anger is derived from hurt and fear.

When I feel anger, I know that somewhere preceding the anger is hurt or fear, i.e. when I'm feeling angry, I'm feeling that my security is somehow jeopardized. I feel trapped; and chose to become angry instead of being vulnerable.

Being vulnerable and allowing my fears and my hurts to surface in a nurturing environment, allows me to practice those feelings instead of choosing anger every time. It's like trusting myself and other people to be angry without getting controlled or controlling, so I may move on into the hurts and fears.

I need my anger, but I can choose to use it as a tool to expel and to set boundaries; instead of a reaction to controlling hurt and fear or someone else. I can choose to allow anger to protect me and not control me (or someone else). I take the control and the terror out of the anger in order for it not to become rage.

Is that clear?

UPSET ABOUT LIFE

2005-05-30T23:03:00.000+02:00

How does one convey anger thoughts, upset feelings? The wave upon rippling shudder that reverberates and enrages, fulminating my mind's eye?

The words that malform like cement mixers in my mouth?

Nothing I say comes out like I think I mean.

I feel anguish and I blabber insensate nonsense, spouting out restlessness and claustrophobic curses.

The denial-acceptance depravity is unquenchable and furious. Maddening thoughts of glory and forfeit, a lost cause in a valiant battle. Forever seeking closure, forgiveness, release.

AaaaaaaaaaaaAAAAaaaaaaaaaahhhhhhhhhhhhhhh!!!!!!!!!!!

My screeching primal scream, tearing my soul apart.

UPSET ABOUT HEAVEN

2005-05-29T18:44:00.000+02:00

Knock, knock, knock on heaven's door...

Who's there? Anybody?

Hellllooooo?!?

Well, ok, I'm upset about heaven -- because it isn't there...

Or is it?

This is what upsets me: I don't really know.
So, I'm upset.

Upset. Upset-t-t-t-t-t!!!

Christian theology, as understood in the 18th and 19th centuries, was based on a heaven which included the following characteristics:

(1) Describability: life after death continues the present existence and must therefore share its concrete, describable features; it cannot be totally different.

(2) New experience: as a real life, the new existence must involve a continuing succession both of time and of new experiences in time. Life must always go on, it cannot simply stand still as if it were frozen.

(3) Self-consciousness: eternal life is not something that happens, as it were, from the outside to some immortal substance. Whatever survives death - the "person" or the soul - must be a self-conscious individual with the will to participate actively in a new existence.

(4) Relatedness to God: Christian doctrine expected a stronger and more explicit relationship of the individual to the deity in heaven than is possible in the present life. God must be present to the blessed in an overwhelming way.

I'm quite sure some of us still think of heaven as above.
Come on, admit it!

Those contemporary Christians who maintain the modern perspective on heaven continue to see life after death as fulfilling these categories. Twentieth-century religious visions, near-death experiences, imaginative literature or poetry, and spiritualist accounts continue to describe the existence of life in another world. Life after death is still life and so a mother's voice may still be recognised, a heavenly field will blossom with flowers, a warm and loving God will greet each new arrival. The dead continue to be tested, to learn, and to develop their spiritual potential. The growth of the soul after death, especially in Latter-day Saint theology, requires the self-conscious spirit to make choices and to participate actively in the various levels of after-death experience.

Contemporary versions of the modern heaven assume that the personality and individuality of the righteous soul persist in the afterlife. At the same time, the contemporary modern heaven is decidedly more theocentric than its Victorian ancestor In a Gallup survey some years ago, only 8 percent of those polled assumed they would enjoy material comforts in life after death, while 54 percent believed that they would be in the presence of God or Jesus Christ. Even though Christians expect to meet their families, they accept that the primary focus of heaven will be the divine. In a time when it is easy not to believe in heaven, those who choose to continue in this belief insist that communion with God is basic to eternal life.

Comforting.
Well, not really. It's just that we need a father-figure, and God fits the profile immensely.

More later...

ON BEING UPSET

2005-05-27T22:27:00.000+02:00

Being upset is a commitment.

Can you believe that?

Literally, if you are not already committed to something, you can not be upset. Or - to put it another way - you are not upset unless it is against a background of commitment.

No, I do not mean that you are committed to being upset. What I mean is that if you look, you will see that without a commitment to something great being thwarted, you would not get upset.

I am suggesting that you question everything that is going on with you when you are upset to reveal and get back in touch with what you are really committed to. Not only will that give you your vision and power back, but it will also create a new opening for action to get you back on track.

I find there are three ways of getting upset:

-for a thwarted intention;
-for an unfulfilled expectation;
-for an undelivered communication.

Can you suggest more?

You do not have to do anything, nor do you have to be any particular way to be OK. You are already OK. If you look at an upset in the light of that you are already OK, you will be able to tell the truth about the upset, and you will be able to distinguish the three items that comprise it.

If you take the appropriate actions to complete those items, you will get your life back. You will be enabled to move on into the breakthrough that awaits.

Well, NOW I'M UPSET!

Actually, I'm ANGRRRRRRY!

But while anger is often an unwelcome and terrifying part of the human experience, it also offers some amazing gifts.

• Understanding our anger and communicating our needs can lead to increased intimacy, more fulfilling relationships and a greater chance that our needs will be met.

• Releasing resentment can free up our energy for healthier endeavours.

• Acknowledging and taking care of our anger can improve our health.

• Channeling our anger constructively can open up our inspiration, creativity and artistic expression.

• Anger can be a catalyst for deeper connection with our spiritual life.

So, it's good to be angry, uh?

images

2005-05-08T12:03:00.000+02:00

Characters