The Flooks

Flames

2010-01-21T17:07:00.000-07:00

Do not pull yourself from the fire too soon
That heat has work to do on you,
and the Master Forger knows far better
than metals she is pounding
into plowshares
and amulets
and swords.

Do not curse the flames that strengthen,
that make shiny and sharp
the dull iron of the heart.
That Master forger is working,
pounding night and day,
to turn you into something useful
and beautiful
and strong.

Dreaming

2010-01-21T16:54:00.001-07:00

You are like a new-wed bride
who on her wedding night forgets
her nuptial vows and that golden
spouse who lies beside her,
and dreams herself lonely at the alter,
abandoned, made a cuckhold
by some fairer lass,
while her new-wed groom above
supine body hovers, contemplating
supple lines of cheek and lip,
wondering what visions play behind
sleeping eyes.

You cry out in your dreaming,
(and who wouldn't?) but know that even now
some sweet lover is caressing your shoulder,
smoothing your hair on the pillow,
waiting, just waiting,
for you to awake.

Sure, eventually the Sun will rise
and you'll wake up naturally, without even trying;
but why not try a little now,
since this dream has turned so bad,
to crack an eyelid
before the dawn arrives?

Devotion

2009-09-21T09:03:00.002-06:00

I am a concubine for my Lord
and poor prostitute,
never demanding my wages,
accepting sweet words
as payment.

And when that pimp,
the World,
comes looking after me
my hands are empty,
my pockets barren.

And yes, I will be beaten,
each lash sweet
with the memory of my Lord's
embrace.

Mount Helena in Winter

2009-02-14T16:05:00.001-07:00

snow falling
through lodgepole pines
beautiful white

Poem for Brigid

2009-02-02T16:01:00.002-07:00

Oh, sweet Brigid, sing in my breast
Of light and love's warm sun rays.
'Tis time we laid old maid Winter to rest
And made room for your warmer days.

Oh, sweet Brigid, weave me a spell,
That will brighten the cloud-dreary skies.
Bring my heart water from your sacred well
Fill my ears with sounds of new-born cries.

Oh, sweet Brigid, light me a fire
Cast your light that will drive out all dark.
Kindle my soul and my spirit entire
With the song of the Robin and Meadowlark.

We've waited long nights for your sweet return,
Sweet Brigid, sweet Brigid, for you we have yearned!
Yes, we've waited long nights for your sweet return,
Sweet Brigid, sweet Brigid, for you we have yearned!

The Latest Christian Teen Devotional Excercise

2009-01-31T19:32:00.001-07:00

www.saddlebacking.com

Could this be the future of Christianity??? Let's hope so!

Friendly Advice

2009-01-30T20:28:00.004-07:00

Peace does not in sadness live,
Nor in a heavy heart can Love reside,
For only unrest can a sadness give,
And a heavy heart cannot open wide.

Go you then, and live in Joy,
And let your Joy a beacon be.
Look you for light in many things,
And in many things a light you'll see.

Know what is come is soon to pass,
So take now time to treasure this,
This grain of sand in the hourglass,
Oh what a shame it would be for you to miss!

See how it sparkles and it glitters so,
In one brief moment's quick descent,
Giving its all for this one show,
And this one show for you was meant.

So perk your ears and watch you close,
And love each moment's brief display,
And feel you things and sniff your nose,
You can fill your life with Love this way.

I tell you this because I Love you so,
And it hurts my heart to hear you cry.
There are so many things I would have you know,
Like your heart is a bird, if you let it fly.

I'll put the key in the latch, but it's yours to turn.
So turn it, turn it! That bird has wings!
It needs open sky if it is to learn,
To fly, to soar...to perch on things.

But with your worries you've built a cage,
And each day a layer to the walls you add,
And when you grow cramped you moan and rage,
And claim that the world has made you sad.

But I know a secret that you have forgot,
And this cage that you've built, I can help you unlock it.
Listen, you're searching for something you've got,
And the key to this cage, you'll find in your pocket.

Love is the key and the sky and your wings
And life a gift not made to last.
So hurry, go now, Love you many things,
For today's tomorrow will soon be past.

So let now Peace in Happiness live,
And let now Love in our hearts reside,
And happy Love let us receive and give,
And let our hearts be open wide.

For Peace is treasure that will not rust,
And Love the only truth we can always trust.

Waiting

2009-01-30T20:06:00.004-07:00

Sometimes I am patient as Death,
or Earth
awaiting the return of all things.
Other times impatience wells
and I am kin to fruitflies, anxious to procreate
and pass on.
So often I feel that I am,
and have,
and can do, nothing.
And this pleases me and makes me
think of you

Keeping Time

2007-07-05T00:05:00.000-06:00

I could spend the whole night

getting back to my stone-chipping roots
hand and skin where flint and obsidian
once hid.

The slap is sharp

but makes nothing,
slices nothing, and I sweat but for
quivering air, and no animal falls lifeless to feed
the beloved community.

Quivering air and a tapping foot,

a song to lift the melancholy
and time to keep it all in place. The children grow, they turn away
and back and have children of their own and get old and die.

Our flint-knapping marks the rhythm of their passing,

we leave only flakes and arrowheads to mark our time
and quivering air in a rhythm that always is,
even when we have ceased from playing it.

How to make a sacrifice to MOLOCH

2007-05-29T19:34:00.000-06:00

1. Prepare an alter to MOLOCH.

The alter should consist of a television tuned to Fox News with the volume muted (sacrifices made during Bill O’Reilly’s show are especially effacious). On top of the alter you should place one black candle representing the ABYSS OF ETERNAL CONSUMPTION, and one red candle representing THE NECTAR OF COLLATERAL DAMAGE.

2. Stake the SACRIFIAL BEAST next to the alter.

Appropriate selection of the SACRIFICIAL BEAST is of the utmost importance. Either a black female goat in estrus or the un-baptized baby of a Christian family are to be prefered. If circumstances do not allow you to obtain either of the above, a common house cat or elderly neighbor may be substituted.

3. Cast a protective circle of dead cockroaches around the alter.

Dead mice may also be used. If you are using cockroaches, poisoning is preferred to squishing, as squished cockroaches are messy and difficult to work with.

4. Light the black candle and recite aloud three times the first sacred mantra:

MOLOCH IS ONE AND KARL ROVE IS HIS APOSTLE

5. Light the red candle and recite aloud three times the second sacred mantra:

MAHU CHENEY MAHU MURDOCH MAHU COULTER MAHU BLAIR.

6. Cut the throat of the SACRIFICIAL BEAST.

Babies have a lot of fat around their necks, which can make it difficult to know if you have cut deep enough to sever the jugular vein. If you are using one for a SACRIFICIAL BEAST don’t take any chances: decapitate the motherfucker.

7. Write out a check for at least $200 to the REPUBLICAN NATIONAL COMMITTEE.

Write the boon you are seeking or the name of the person you want killed on the Note line. Remember, the bigger your check, the better the chance that MOLOCH will grant your request!

and a Happy New Year...

2007-05-23T10:32:00.000-06:00

... and all the holidays/regular days we missed between now and six months ago.

Diptherio and I talked of picking things up again, so here I go.

I am spurred by how useful and entertaining I found the first 14 months of posts when I was reminiscing. I encourage perusal. Only 62 posts (plus comments), but some of them are good.

Actually useful isn't a fitting adjective for our posts. We have yet to post anything very instructive.

Anyway, it'd be good to hear from you again (especially you, Yum, as you have been particularly absent from regular communication channels).

If the posts teach me anything, it's that we do our best work when there is an assignment.

For our first return assignment lets create a how-to in words or pictures or both (it can be technical or abstract). If you don't know what you want to demonstrate, please choose from this short list:

making and/or eating a sandwich
answering a knocked door/rung doorbell
cheating at scrabble
rubbing your eyes so hard you see stars
faking out
overstaying your welcome
folding a poker hand

These are just suggestions. I'm not even sure I'll choose one of them, but we'll see.

Poem in 6 min. of Less...Go!

2006-12-31T12:24:00.000-07:00

In Lax, New Years Eve

Japanese girls in hooker-boots,
Hare Krishnas Gita-thumping in the lobby,
complements my stash then requests cash
Pasty white americans, bleached by LA smog,
and their children on cell-phones,
dreaming of runnig the suburban off the road
while talking with Brad Pitt.
Fake palms seem healthier than real ones,
Asian mini-skirts show healthy asian buns.
The celibate watches, waits,
ignores the ignoble fantasy.

In Defense of Not Knowing

2006-12-11T19:58:00.000-07:00

Delivered to the Unitarian-Universalist Fellowship of Missoula MT, Dec. 10, 2006.
_____________________________________________________________________

On Exactitude in Science

...In that Empire, the Art of Cartography attained such Perfection that the map of a single Province occupied the entirety of a City, and the map of an Empire, the entirety of a Province. In time, those Unconscionable Maps no longer satisfied, and the Cartographers guild struck a Map of the Empire whose size was that of the Empire, and which coincided point for point with it. The following Generations, who were not so fond of the Study of Cartography as their Forebears had been, saw that that vast Map was Useless, and not without some Pitilessness was it, that they delivered it up to the Inclemencies of Sun and Winters. In the Deserts of the West, still today, there are Tattered Ruins of that Map, inhabited by Animals and Beggars; in all the Land there is no other Relic of the Disciplines of Geography.

Suarez Miranda, Viajes de varones prudentes,
Libro IV, Cap. XLV, Lerida, 1658

--Jorge Luis Borges, from The Maker, reprinted in The Aleph and Other Stories, trans. A. Hurley.

In his book, Sense and Science, Alfred Korzybski coined the phrase, "the map is not the territory." What he meant by this was to remind us that those conceptions, paradigms, and belief systems with which we interpret the reality that surrounds us are maps of the territory of reality, not reality itself. Due to his firm belief in what, on the face of it, seems a rather self-evident assertion, Korzybski declared that the word "is", along with its various conjugations, should be expunged from our vocabulary, since the very word implies a confusion of map and territory, model and reality.

For instance, I might say, the shirt I am wearing is green." This statement would, however, be incorrect, according to Korzybski, because it fudges the distinction between map and territory. My shirt appears to me to be green because green light-waves are reflecting off of it, while red light is being absorbed, but to say my shirt "is" green is to confuse our perceptions, our maps of reality, with the reality itself.

Our tendency to gloss over the distinction between map and territory, implicit in the very language we use to think with, leads to no end of confusion, especially in the sciences, which we generally expect to explain to us what reality "really is". And this tendency may lead not only to confusion but to outright contempt or even hatred. This usually occurs when two people using different maps of reality attempt to communicate, one or both of them believeing their map to be reality. One refers to a landmark, clearly labeled on her map, the other consults his map and, finding no such landmark, blithely contradicts her. Name calling and fisticuffs ensue.

Many people, when confronted with statements that contradict their own map of reality, assume the propounder of these statements must be un-educated, deluded, or just plain crazy. It doesn't occur to them that maybe the other, spouting these absurd statements, is simply refering to a different map of reality, which may show different aspects of the landscape than their own, or bear different labels on major landmarks. This particular form of close-mindedness stems, of course, from mistaking one's own map of reality for reality itself, and is as prone to strike "open-minded" liberals as "closed-minded" conservatives.

If you're like me, this kind of thing can be accepted on an intellectual level rather easily, but to accept it practically, existentially, is somewhat more difficult. I may intellectually consent that my views of reality are just that: views, with no more "objective" claim to reality than anyone else's, but when I am actually confronted by another with a different viewpoint, I find it hard not to assume that they are just wrong. The reason for this difficulty, I think, stems from our linguistic conceptualization of Being.

Something either "is" or it "isn't," but never both, never neither. If my view "is" right, than a contradictory view must "be" wrong. It is difficult to concieve that two contradictory statements might both be true, or that a statement might be both true and false, the structure of our language all but prohibits it. If I admit that a contradictory view "is right", I must be assuming that my view "is wrong." It is this false dichotomy, created by our linguistic conceptualization of Being, that leads us to so violently reject the value of views or opinions that contradict our own, after all, who ever admitted they were wrong without a fight?

Fortunately, reality is much more nuanced than language, and the universe has no problem affirming contradictory truths. For instance, I can tell you that right now I am simultaneously sitting still, writing this, travelling at hundreds of miles an hour, and moving at near-light speed. All of these statements are true, depending on my point of reference, that is, depending on the relevent map of reality. Viewed from here in this room I am standing still, viewed from the moon I can be seen to move around the axis of the earth, viewed from the center of the solar system I can be seen to move also around the sun, viewed from the center of the milkyway, even greater addittional movement is percievable. No one of these perspectives is objectively right or wrong, and so none of the seemingly contradictory statements derived from them are objectively right or wrong. This type of relitivity applies to other types of truth as well: emotional, spiritual, psychological, philosophical and otherwise.

For instance, say a person is experiencing depression. A neurologist might claim that the cause is a chemical imbalance in the brain, a priest might say that the cause is demon-possession, while the psychoanalyst claims that the root cause is repressed childhood trauma. Which of these is truly the case? The answer depends, of course, on the map of reality to which one is refering. We might protest that "obviously" demon-possession can be ruled out wince we all know that demons don't exist. The problem with this is that excorcisms have been known to work. In the final analysis, our judgement of the truth of these competing claims must rest upon their efficacy. We might say that effective excorcisms are merely the placebo effect, but then we committ the sin of speculating beyond the evidence (not to mention that "placebo effect" is simply euphamism for our ignorance). The priest, we should add, committs the same sin when he claims that his effectous excorcism is proof of the existance of demons. All we have really is the phenomenological data: patient depressed, excorcism performed, patient no longer depressed. And the same goes for psychoanalysis and drug therapy.

The question is not which belief system is true, but rather which belief system is relevant. In our example of the depressed patient, the question is which belief system allows him to recover. Whichever one that is will provide him with the "correct", that is to say relevant, map of reality. To insist that an effective reality map "is wrong" because it does not agree with our own map, even if our own map has proven ineffective, is simply to display our own prejudice and intellectual bias. It is always possible that some excorcisms are effective because demons do exist, just in some way we haven't yet considered.

Our culture, for the last few hundred years, has been obsessed with scientific truth and with the material technology that the quest for that truth has engendered. Scientific knowledge and material technology, however, have proven quite ill-suited for application to many of the problems which we humans face. True, for certain problems, science and technology have been quite effective, but when I am confronted by another being with whom I must interact, all our super-string theories and international space stations help me not one jot. Unfortunately, in our fervor for ever greater heights of scientific learning and ever more grandiose feats of material technology, we have completely rejected the validity of other reality maps that could help us in just these situations.

If I am in the midst of a difficult relationship, which do you suppose would be the more helpful reality map: that God is Everything, God is Love, I am Love; or we're all headed for Oblivion, there is no higher consciousness than my own, Existance is meaningless? For obvious reasons, the first of these two belief systems is more liekly to lead to a positive outcome in a difficult relationship than the latter. Sadly, many a rational person will flatly deny the truth of the former belief system on the grounds that it conflicts with their intellectual beliefs.

And can we not say that our intellectual , scientific beliefs are "more true" than unverifiable religous beliefs? Well, for starters, only about 4% of all the "stuff" in the universe is percievable by humans, even with the aid of our most sensitive scientific insturments. Of the remainder, 23% is Dark Matter and 73% is Dark Energy. We know virtually nothing about Dark Matter and Energy, other than that they must exist; as to their nature and composition we can only speculate. As David Cline put it in Scientific American, "The motions of...visible matter reveal that it is merely flotsam on an unseen sea of unknown material. We know little about that sea. The terms we use to describe it, Dark Matter and Dark Energy, serve mainly as expressions for our ignorance."

Matters hardly improve when we move from the scientific sphere to the psychological sphere, where we actually spend our lives. Here we have not only to contend with our physical perceptual limitations but also our own ideosyncratic cognitive biases. These stem from our linguistic programming and from our socially constructed maps of reality. These maps tell us what is right and what is wrong, what is acceptable and what is not, what is common sense and what is sheer folly. It should go without saying that these maps are quite varied from culture to culture and from person to person, and none of them can be said to be "objectively" correct or incorrect, as none can be judged but with reference to some other subjective map. What is common sense from one perspective may be sheer folly from another perspective, but the reverse may also be true, and how can we choose beween competing versions of common sense, when as Albert Einstein put it, "Common sense is the collection of prejudices acquired by age 18"?

What I am trying to get at here is this: all of our "truths" are only truths from a particular angle, from a particular perspective on reality. There is no way to get around this. Perception and cognition both require that vast amounts of information be tuned-out or disregarded. As the sons of the Cartographers discovered in the opening story, a map that doesn't disregard much of the territory is utterly useless. If we could see radio waves and cellphone transmissions, not to mention infra-red and ultraviolet light, we would be functionally blind, our visual reality map would be worthless.

This means, of course, that all our perceptions and all our understandings are necessarily incomplete. We must keep in mind that there may, in fact, be truths that we simply cannot percieve using our accustomed maps of reality. And while a particular reality map may be useful in many situations, that doesn't mean we should cling blindly to it when it ceases to be effective.

Once we have accepted the validity of opposing viewpoints, the real fun can begin, because once we have stopped rejecting them as invalid we may ourselves step into them occasionally, to there glean some truth which otherwise may have escaped our notice. In this manner can our own existances be enriched, by drinking deeper of the infinite ocean of Meaning. Also, our ability to understand and communicate with others will be improved. We need no longer dismiss the fundamentalist Christian as a wacko, but can rather enter into his perspective for a time, and express ourselves using the language of his reality map. After all, it is the meaning that is important in communication, not the vocabulary used to convey it.

So this is my wish for the upcoming year, that we might all keep in mind that the realities which we experience are but a tiny fraction of true Reality, of the Universe as it is, and that we allow this knowledge to make us less judgemental of others whose realities may seem strange to us, and that we might even try to step into some of these other realities, to see what truths we might discover there.

An Epigram of Kabir

2006-12-06T22:04:00.000-07:00

Kabir:

The hut was made of sticks
And all ten sides caught fire;

Pundits, pundits--

they burned inside

While the fools ran out

and saved their lives

Voting in Chicago ...or: the republican who sketched my portrait in a church basement

2006-11-07T08:15:00.000-07:00

So I went to vote this morning and was a bit disappointed when I saw there were no "I voted" stickers being handed out. How can I smugly broadcast my civic participation and cast judgement on others without these modern-day scarlet letters?!

I did, however, receive two ballots to fill out*, so I guess that extra voting power makes up for no stickers.

The ballots in my precinct aren't electronic yet, but they are odd to me. It's a scan-tron of sorts. For each candidate there is a broken arrow pointing to their name. Like this:
<-------
You are given a black marker and bridge the arrows of your favored candidates. Like this:
<-------
The arrows of unfavorable candidates remain unfixed and broken.
I know: this is hardly remarkable.

My polling place is in the basement of an old stone and cement Catholic church named for Saint Ita. Saint Ita died when a beetle devoured her side and grew to the size of a pig.
It has a ring to it?
The bells in the tower of Saint Ita have long-been replaced by innocuous-looking loudspeakers, poking out from behind the lace-fine Gothic stonework. Now pre-recorded ringing broadcasts to the neighborhood each hour, much louder than the mechanical, rope-strung bells ringing from the Baptist church two blocks down.
Is the recording of bells from Rome or Ita's native Ireland or of electronic bells hidden in an algorithm?

*Don't worry, I was honest and handed back the extra ballot. I didn't see any winking and nodding going on, so I don't suspect conspiracy although the Republican voting judge was writing furiously on a notepad after I approached the judges table with the extra ballot. Maybe he suddenly thought of lyrics to a song he's been working out in his head. Maybe he was drawing my picture. For some reason, I prefer this last scenario over the other two.

Ga-Ga-Goo-Goo, the Flooks is One Year Old!

2006-10-29T17:17:00.000-07:00

So, I notice it's our one year anniversary. I suggest we throw a party and invite every woman that ever sang a song. What do you guys think we should do?

The thing is...

2006-09-21T06:20:00.000-06:00

I need you to start blogging more. I'm in Korea. And honestly, the only person I really enjoy talking to here is the person I married. None of the foreigners I work with are funny or terribly bright or interesting. And the Koreans can't understand anything I'm saying (and vice versa). Oh, and I can't get a phone card to work overseas (I've got three defective ones now), further limiting the amount of witty banter in my life.

SO, even though I hardly ever post (sorry. sorry.), I thought you should both know that I'm addicted to CHECKING the blog and to reading your posts.

Ok. Ok? I'm needy. Help.

News of Mizoo

2006-09-06T19:50:00.000-06:00

Well, iH, our old friend Matt Singer has made the headlines. Apparently he's the state's pre-eminent blogger, with all sorts of connections in the upper echelons of the Dems. Why am I not surprised?

Oh, and send me an email, I somehow only have your old UM address.

Theory of Everything

2006-08-21T20:32:00.000-06:00

So, before the Lavender one set off for Korea, she asked me if I "believed" in super-string theory (one of the latest developments in theoretical physics, yadda, yadda, already superseded by the emerging M-theory, so I‘m told). I didn't have the necessary language or intellectual constructs to answer the question adequately at the time, but I have recently come across both and so will try to present a somewhat exhaustive explanation of my feelings on the "reality" of any theory, scientific or otherwise, below.

The cogent phrase to keep in mind for the following is this: the model is not the reality. This is a restating of Alfred Korzybski's phrase, "the map is not the territory", or as Robert Anton Wilson puts it, in a more gustatory form, "the menu is not the meal." This may seem obvious enough, but if we consider that no sensation, no stimulus, neither internal nor external, comes to us but through a model or map of reality that we use to order and make sense of the near-infinite amount of stimulus with which we are constantly bombarded, we begin to see the depth and implications of this thought.

First, a little background may be in order, so that we might begin to grok the depth of this. For one, scientists have known for some time now (or at least theorized) that the vast majority off all the “stuff” in the universe is "dark" matter. In fact, all the matter and energy that we can sense, with even our most sensitive and powerful scientific instruments, amounts to only about 5% of all the matter and energy in the universe. This seems an almost comically small base of information to be theorizing about the nature of the universe from.

As for objective reality as we, as mere humans, experience it; while we think we see the world around us as it actually is, we are oblivious to all sorts of stimuli and phenomena occurring all around us, all the time. The entire electro-magnetic spectrum, outside the relatively small band of visible light, is invisible to us. We know that radio waves are passing through the air around us (and us) all the time, and yet, without the aid of a radio, we are totally insensate. The same goes for infra-red, ultraviolet, X, and gamma radiation, not to mention all the sonic vibrations above and below our normal range of hearing and the minute aromas of which we are (blissfully?) unaware, but which seem quite apparent to our four-legged friends. And beyond the merely bio-physical limitations restricting our range of awareness, we also have to contend with psychological phenomena that serve to distort or totally block out much, if not all, of the stimuli that we do perceive. We have all had the experience of selective hearing, where we block out the environmental "noise" around us while focused on some absorbing task. Added to this sort of attentional blocking we humans, highly-developed as we are, are also prone to all sorts of psychological imprinting and conditioning, manifesting as various defense mechanisms and prejudices that can and do greatly distort all of the input we receive from our physical and social environments. Equally important is our neuro-linguistic programming which literally hypnotizes us into seeing things like “trees”, which, in reality have no existence outside of the neuro-linguistic structure itself (there is no such thing as “a tree”, in the generic sense, only this or that particular tree, which is genetically and existentially unique from all other “trees”).

It would be possible, at this point, to bemoan our sorry state as "objective" observers of the universe, and conclude that any "true" knowledge of the universe is precluded by our immense perceptual handicaps. Consider, however, that if we really could perceive every stimuli and phenomena that makes up the universe, we would be functionally "blind". If you were aware of all the ultraviolet and infra-red light along with radio waves and cell phone transmissions, not to mention "dark" matter, it would be exceedingly difficult to drive your car to the grocery store to pick up some bread and ice cream, not to mention carry on a conversation, view a sunset or run a multi-national corporation. And without the abstractions and generalizations of our neuro-linguistic models, scientific knowledge would be impossible, as would be forest management programs. In short, in order to function in the universe it is necessary that we remain unaware of the vast majority of the stimuli we are constantly assaulted with and necessary that we order, sort, and distort the stimuli that we do receive.

The stimuli that we filter out and/or distort, and the ways in which stimuli are distorted, is the function of something I've taken to calling our "reality tunnel," after the great Dr. Timothy Leary and Robert Anton Wilson. Our reality tunnel starts, on the most basic level, with the body/mind apparatus, which, as we have seen, serves to block out the vast majority of all the "stuff" in the universe and allows us to deal with the little bit left over. Layered on top of that are our neuro-linguistic programs that order and shape our perceptions, along with the various psychological screens mentioned above (i.e. a pessimistic attitude, or a fear of rejection). The effect of all these social, psychological and biological blocks and distortions is what I will refer to as our reality tunnel.

To some extent our various reality tunnels agree with one another. This is what we call "consensus reality". We all agree, for instance, that this is a chair that I am sitting in. However, our reality tunnels may also diverge from one another. I may see the chair I am sitting is as a humble and rather shoddy piece of furniture, while someone from another culture may see it as an ostentatious display of wealth. Consensus reality, then, forms only a very small part of “reality,” or perhaps better, of “realities.” These realities correspond to our varying models of the universe but, of course, the model is not the reality.

Because the only thing we can have knowledge of are our individual reality tunnels, no particular reality tunnel can be said to have precedence over any other. In fact, the only statement that we can make regarding the “truth” of any particular reality tunnel is that it is not “the truth”, that is, it is not reality. We are reminded here of Einstein’s thought experiments that led ultimately to the theory of special relativity. These experiments showed that the concepts of physics such as distance and motion are dependent upon the perspective from which one is observing them. Right now I am sitting practically motionless in front of my computer, spinning around the earth’s axis at thousands of miles an hour, and/or hurtling through vast reaches of space at near light speed, all depending upon which perspective one views the motion of my body from. As to whether my body is “really” sitting still or traveling at mind-numbing speed, science can only answer “both and neither.” There is no privileged perspective on reality, and so all perspectives must be granted equal validity.

This thought should give us pause to reflect. We have spoken of “consensus reality” above, but even the most widely held of consensus views cannot be given precedence over divergent views, even if held only by one person. Everyone around me may claim that what I am sitting in is a chair of the standard variety, but if I persist in claiming that it is in fact a terrifying dragon with sixteen wings and seven heads, there is no way to “objectively” determine which view is “real”. A physicist, of course, would claim that, whether dragon or chair, it is almost entirely empty space. All of these views are epistemologically equal in that they are all created by models of reality and, once again, the model is not the reality. In answer to the question of what I am “really” seated on, a chair or a dragon or empty space, the only honest reply is, “all of them and none of them.”

Now, this may all seem a little far-fetched to some. Is there really no objective way of knowing what it is I’m sitting on, a chair or a dragon or just empty space? No, there is not. The reason is that our answer will depend on what model of reality we are referring to in gathering information about the object in question. If we see a chair, we are most likely referring to a standard human nervous system model, which, as we have seen, blocks out far more information than it gathers. Tweak that model just a little though, adding some serotonin here and blocking some acetylcholine receptors there, and the resulting view of reality can change drastically. A chair, for instance, becomes a dragon. Or perhaps we forsake the human nervous system model altogether, tweaked or otherwise, in favor of the scientific model, in which case we “see,” with the assistance of super-sensitive analytic equipment and some high-level math, that the chair is in fact almost nothing but empty space, perhaps with a few one dimensional vibrating strings zooming about inside it’s boundaries.

This is why Korzybski felt the word “is” to be the biggest stumbling block in our linguistic conceptual apparatus. Whenever we say something “is” something (“that basketball is orange”), we lie by omission. We know, for instance, that the basketball is not, in fact orange, but is actually blue. It appears orange to us because the ball reflects orange light (or rather, a wavelength of light that our brains present to us as orange) and absorbs blue light. We also know that a color-blind person, or someone with cerebral damage to certain parts of the brain, sees the ball as a different color than we do, yet their perceptions have just as much “validity” as ours. What we should say is, “that basketball appears orange to me at this time,” or, “that object on which you are sitting appears to me, at present, to be a chair.”

And yet, while we cannot say what it is that I am “really” sitting on, chair or dragon or empty space, we do know that there is something there, some source of stimulus, even if we can’t say “objectively” what it is. There must be some reality, therefore, that underlies our personal realities, some ultimate reality which is the source of all the stimulus that we build into our discrete realities by way of our various models. There is an objective reality, but we can only know about it subjectively.

But might we not experience this greater reality directly, without the intermediary distortion and blocking of our biological and psychological models? The answer, I think, is yes, and that many women and men from all over the world have, in fact, had this experience. However, because the experience of this ultimate reality takes place outside of all reality tunnels, there is, by definition, no way of having knowledge of it, since knowledge is a product of the sorting and ordering of stimuli that is the work of the models that have been left behind. Ultimate Reality cannot be known, therefore, only experienced. However, even saying that this ultimate reality can be experienced may be misleading, since perception requires the selective blocking of certain stimuli which is incompatible with the “experience” of ultimate reality, and who can imagine an experience without perception? This is no doubt the source of the highly metaphoric and ambiguous language used by the mystics, saints, and sages of all times, and why many talk of being, becoming, or being filled by God, or Godhead, rather than perceiving it (God, in this case, being just another name for the ultimate reality that lies behind our individual realities). Perhaps we should say that one can not know or experience reality, but only be it.

But what about science? Doesn’t science offer us an objective view of the cosmos, or at least the 5% of it that we can sense? If something can be scientifically proven, can it not be said to be more real than an individual’s skewed perceptions? No. Science is not objective, firstly for the simple fact that it is not possible to test all conceivable hypotheses. Because of time and resource limitations, not to mention sheer impossibility, as regards dark matter for example, science must necessarily limit its investigations to testing those hypotheses, which seem plausible to the scientist at the time. Hypotheses are subjectively chosen, in other words. A truly objective science would have to give equal weight to all hypotheses, until all could be tested and either verified or disproven. Only then, after testing all conceivable hypotheses, could an objective science give a truly objective answer .

For instance, I have a hypothesis that all matter is in fact composed of very small fairies who fly about, much like the particles of conventional physical theory, and the flapping of whose wings gives objects the appearance of solid form. Oh yes, and these fairies are smaller than anything yet discovered in physics, in fact they compose the very strings of string theory. Now what does our supposedly objective scientist have to say about my hypothesis? That it is ridiculous? That it is a piece of raving lunacy and that I would do better to devote my time to making mud pies than to theorizing about the nature of the universe? Of course not, for she is an objective woman, our scientist, and simply informs me that my hypothesis is very interesting but there is, at present, no way of testing any part of it and so a hypothesis it must remain. Not proven, but not disproven either, and so still a possibility. A science (like our actually existing science) that pretends to give a definitive answer before all the hypotheses have been duly tested cannot be said to be in any way objective. From the minute that the scientist forms her hypothesis, she is relying on a huge mass of unstated social biases, neuro-linguistic programming, and physical and conceptual limitations that make the whole endeavor hopelessly subjective from the very beginning. And if the science is subjective in the beginning, can it really be said to be objective in the end?

To demonstrate: math is widely considered to be the most objective of sciences. “2 + 2 = 4” is practically synonymous with undeniable truth. It has been shown, however, that even the most basic of our mathematical principals are based on nothing but human subjectivity. The story of Euclid’s fifth postulate is instructive.

As we should all know, the Greek Euclid was the first person (the first that we know of, anyway) to create a systematic and logical system of geometry. He based his geometry on five postulates or axioms. The first four were pretty straight forward, “between any two points there exists one line connecting them,” stuff like that, that just seems too obvious to second guess. His fifth postulate, however, was quite a bit more wordy and complicated, something about converging lines and the angle of incidence being less than ninety degrees. Just looking at the five postulates, the fifth one seems really out of place. Euclid wasn’t too pleased with it. He tried to get rid of it by proving it as a proposition based on the other four axioms, but no dice, it couldn’t be done. He wanted like anything to just get rid of it somehow, problem was, he couldn’t prove more than 28 propositions without assuming it. It seemed right to him, but somehow it seemed wrong too.

The fifth postulate came to be known as the “parallel postulate” because rephrased, what it says is this; given a line l and a point A not on that line, there exists one line through A that is parallel to l (draw it out, it’ll make sense). It continued to seem wrong to mathematicians long after Euclid was returned to the dust from whence he sprang, and many a budding mathematician whiled away countless hours of their youth working on the mysterious fifth postulate. Most of them grew out of it eventually and went on to more productive areas of math, and for more than a millennia, no one got any farther on the problem than Euclid did. Then a couple of mathematicians thought they’d try to show the necessity of the fifth postulate by showing that assuming something else would lead to insoluble contradictions in the resulting geometric system. One guy assumed that there were an infinite number of lines through A that were parallel to l, somebody else assumed that there weren’t any parallel lines. The thing was they found that the resulting mathematics, using the “nonsensical” alternate fifth postulates, worked out just as well as Euclid’s geometry. This was puzzling.

Eventually, it was discovered that the new “non-Euclidean” geometries were simply descriptions of geometry in “non-flat” space. For instance, the geometry that assumed an infinite number of parallel lines was describing geometry in hyperbolic space, that is, if space is shaped like a hyperbola rather than a flat plane. The geometry that assumed no parallel lines described geometry on a sphere. This was interesting enough in itself, while still remaining in the realm of mathematical abstraction, but then Einstein went and used Riemann’s non-Euclidean geometry in his groundbreaking theory of physical reality, and showed that it was necessary for describing the universe. Robert Anton Wilson has a phrase for this kind of thing. It begins with “mind” and ends with a four-letter explitive starting with “f”.

So, does that mean that Riemann’s geometry is right and Euclid’s is wrong? No, it means that they each describe reality from a particular perspective. Our universe is neither Euclidean nor non-Euclidean, so neither are “right” or “wrong,” in the usual sense, rather, they each present us with a different aspect of some larger, more fundamental truth, of which both are but particular expressions (the particulars of that expression depending on the fundamental axioms upon which the system is founded).

And the thing about axioms is that they are, by definition, unproven (and therefore, at least possibly, subjective). Perhaps it is the case that we first discovered Euclidean geometry not because it is somehow more fundamentally “real,” but because of some idiosyncrasy of our bio-physical or neuro-linguistic apparatus. Maybe it was because Euclid worked out his theorems on a flat surface and not a hyperbolic one. Either way, it seems likely that we first discovered Euclidean geometry because our models of the universe somehow predisposed us to. But of course, the model is not the reality.

Returning now to the “hard” sciences, we see additionally that science experiments do not yield theories or explanations, only data, and it is then up to the scientist to formulate a model of some sort to explain all, or most, of the data. However, even if the model does explain all the data, that does not necessarily mean that it is the “real” explanation of reality, only that it seems to explain all the data we know about at this time, and that we haven't devised any other model that explains the data as well or better. Again, formation of the model to fit the reality is a totally subjective endeavor, dependent largely upon what the scientist thinks is likely.

The final nail in the coffin of “objective” science comes from Kurt Gödel, whose eponymous theorem proved that no logical system can be both complete and non-contradictory. That is, if a logical system describes all that it purports to describe, it will necessarily contain a contradiction (for instance, a mathematical system cannot prove the axioms upon which it is founded), or, on the other hand, if the logical system is free from contradictions, it is necessarily incomplete, having as it were, some dark areas which the system cannot “see.” This is the case for what is called “neutral geometry,” which is basically Euclid without the fifth postulate. You can solve a number of geometric problems with neutral geometry, but there are many more that you can’t solve. For instance, we all know that the sum of the angles of a triangle add up to 180 degrees in Euclidean geometry, but neutral geometry isn’t able to give an answer one way or the other. To quote Wikipedia:

Absolute geometry is an example of an incomplete postulational system. Consider the statement "The sum of the angles in every triangle is equal to two right angles". This is not provable in absolute geometry, because if it was, it would be true in hyperbolic geometry, and the sum of the angles in a hyperbolic triangle is less than two right angles. However, the negation of the statement, that there exists a triangle whose angles don't add up to two right angles, is not provable either, because if it was, it would be provable in Euclidean geometry, and the sum of the angles in Euclidean geometry is always two right angles. Therefore this proposition is undecidable in absolute geometry.

Science, of course, works through the medium of logical systems and therefore all supposedly comprehensive scientific theories, such as the physicists’ coveted “theory of everything” (or T.O.E.), must fall prey to Gödel’s theorem (if everything is, in fact, composed of one-dimensional vibrating strings, what are those made out of and where did they come from?). It is futile, therefore, to look to science to provide us with any ultimate answers. It is probable, I think, that if physicists are successful in their hunt for the elusive T.O.E., that it will only be a matter of time before a competing T.O.E. arrives on the scene, like Non-Euclidean geometry, to throw a monkey wrench in the whole works again. At that point, of course, we have to start looking for a new T.O.E. that can explain how there can be more than one T.O.E. And round and round we go…

Reality, however, Ultimate Reality, that which lies behind all of our theorizing and conceptualizing, that source of all stimuli which our bodies and minds literally shape around us into our perceived “realities”, is neither incomplete nor contradictory. It is what Rene Guenon terms the “metaphysical infinite”, and our reality tunnels are far too constrained and finite to ever contain it. We may be able to experience It (or be It), but we can never conceptualize It, never know It. All our perceptions are the result of our particular reality tunnels, our models for organizing and interacting with the universe, and the model is not the reality .

Break

2006-08-17T16:33:00.001-06:00

If sacred land we tread with hearts
uncluttered by cares that fill our days,
and if we turn with all our skill and arts
and vow to mend our sinful ways,
and if we turn our love on all that we see
and hate not the bad and loving still
those that do harm us, then surely we'll be
children of God, beset by no ill.
For how can it be that blood is shed still,
when all these long centuries, lo, it's been shed?
Has it not been enough, have we not had our fill?
Will we not stop to count the numberless dead?

Mother says only love can heal this ache,
we must love and love, till our hardened hearts break.

2006-08-17T16:33:00.000-06:00

If it wasn't for dissapointment...

2006-08-14T12:18:00.000-06:00

Today saw the end of my most recent experiment (aka: work-diversion). The experiment's failure to produce the desired results was another blow to the idea of a magical and meaningful universe. (Actually, the experiment might have been successful, but my ability to interperet anything magical or meaningful failed.)

For four (4) weeks I have logged the messages that my TI-30X Solar calculator displayed to me each morning. It seems that, overnight, when the building lights in my office were turned off, the calculator would abandon it's default zero and take on new and indecipherable messages in its monochromatic LED display. For example:

July 27th, 2006:
Functions activated by the TI-30X: M1, 2ND, DEG
Display Text: nF(<-upside down F)110811(<-these 2 ones appeared closer together as the right and left walls of a zero digit).8n0

Some days the calculator would start the day blank as if to pause. The last three days of the test the calculator began the day with zero, so I assume that whatever it was trying to tell me has concluded.

Anyway, I can decipher no patterns from these 20 days of text and, as I said before, fear that this says more about me than my calculator. I poured over my notes this weekend and thought I might come close to Truth, but alas it isn't so.

somthing unpolished and spontaneous whilst working

2006-08-09T13:41:00.000-06:00

Action Figure

and maybe there's more to memory than these
stories I repeat to myself, endlessly

cataloging anecdote and incidence as if there's
something I might cull from this life

so far. I cross streets all the time looking down
and recall walking barefoot across a hot

sticky stretch of asphalt at thirteen. That was
the day I sold my He-Man action figures

to an old man at the garage sale. I am nothing
at the crosswalk but that story and a pair of eyes

glued to the reflective white strip leading me
onward; walking from wherever.

A Split in the Water

2006-08-01T15:41:00.000-06:00

Your son, beneath, gasps;
lets out something like
Your name but
forgets. Bones crack.
Lights from town reflect off clouds.

The Toyota stands there
a diver caught mid-dive, just beginning to crack
the water surface.

Your son coughs
again and opens his white eyes.

His empty child’s gaze is spread out
among the roadside crab grass.

You slip off his shoes,
thinking you ought to.

The last slow sigh
from the engine winds down, sloughs off sound
as if sinking between that split in the water.

And you?

2006-07-16T10:48:00.000-06:00

Right, so I'm living in Korea now. So far I'm liking most things-- the rain, the busy streets, the way a four year old ran up to me on the subway and gave me a lemon donut. The only disappointment thus far has been our apartment, which is about the size of hollowed watermelon.

I'm trying to do some writing about this experience, but it's proven to be pretty difficult. I mean, who wants to hear about someone else's travels? It's so fucking boring. I can't bear to read that kind of writing myself, "Blah, blah, we saw so many AMAZING things and it was, like, totally amazing. And then we saw this poor person on the street and I realized that, like, there is so much suffering in the world. And then I saw a lotus flower... etc. etc." So I'm trying to find someway to write about Korea that doesn't make ME want to fall asleep. And it's really hard. Even though I love living here and many things are, like, totally amazing to me. So, we'll see. Any ideas for a hip book about Korea that the world is dying to read?

Teaching is going well, except that I teach too many classes. I teach a wide range of ages and levels, so I keep busy with planning. So far I really like the youngest kids (about 6?) and the oldest ones (13) but I'm having a harder time bonding with those pesky 10-year-olds, who have lost their cuteness but haven't developed very interesting personalities yet.

Ok, that's it for now. Hope you are both well.

Four Zen Jokes

2006-07-14T14:41:00.000-06:00

Q: Why did the chicken cross the road?

A: It was just crossing the road.

redux:
Q: Why did the chicken cross the road?

A: Road and chicken are one, therefore crossing is impossible.

redux-redux:
Q: Why did the chicken cross the road?

A: I once knew a man who weighed over 300 pounds.

moving on:
Q: What did the Zen Buddhist child say when he was trying to impress his mother?

A: "Look ma, no mind!"

Still here, alive, etc...

2006-07-11T15:41:00.000-06:00

Sorry I haven't posted or commented lately. LOTS of stuff going on right now. I promise to elaborate more later.

It's always good to read from your posts. Not to be too sentimental or too brief, but I miss you both.

Here are some little flowers I drew with MS paint while bored of my job. Give them names or don't, but be sure to enjoy the colors that my 16-bit palette had to offer.

There and Back Again

2006-06-24T11:10:00.000-06:00

Well, after three days and nights in the tent, I moved back into my room in Raleigh's house. Scientists will tell you that there is no such thing as a failed experiment, that even if you don't get the results you were expecting, you're bound to learn something from the process. So, while this particular experiment in alternative living situations didn't pan out as I had initially expected, it did, nonetheless, bring some very positive results.

Namely, it forced me to get rid of all but the essentials. No more shelves of CD's, no more boxes of books (ok, so I've still got a couple boxes of books kicking around, but that's just until I can get them down to Goodwill), no more drawers full of clothes necessitating a dresser. Just the basics. I'd been wanting to do this for some time, but for whatever reason, just couldn't seem to really get started.

The thought that it was time for a "selection of items" and the jettisoning of everything else, first occured to me a couple of weeks before my birthday. I kept meaning to do it, but like I said, I didn't know where to start or what to do with all the accumulated junk. Then I found the campsite while out wandering around in the Rattlesnake, and the thought came to me, "I have to live here", and came with such force that there really was no point in trying to ignore it. Nor did I want to ignore it, because as soon as the desicion was made, it felt like the rightest thing in the world. I tried to wrap some intellectual reasons around why I needed to move into a tent, but that was just because when people asked for an explanation, I couldn't bring myself to say "because my Soul tells me to." Some residual fear of having people think I'm crazy, I guess.

It felt great, and completely right, moving all the stuff out of my room, removing the sediment of a consumer lifestyle, seeing my outward life getting stripped away. And then, after all had been removed, I looked at the room and thought, "You know, this wouldn't be a bad place to live, now. It's kind of nice."

After two nights in the tent and realizing that getting to Raleigh's early enough to take a shower before work (a definite must, as the preceding nights ride UP to the campsite inevitabley left me sweat-soaked) required me to leave the tent well before the sun came up, and that stumbling around in the woods in total darkness looking for my food bag was just not going to work, I knew that I would in fact be living in that nice room that I had just emptied of debris.

Fortunately, the guy who was scheduled to move into my room ended up housesitting for his father instead. The Lord, as they say, works in mysterious and mundane ways.

Jaya Hos!

So, I live in Korea now...

2006-06-23T08:22:00.000-06:00

I'm Moving into a Tent in the Rattlesnake...

2006-05-28T17:29:00.000-06:00

Pummeling you with more of my Poetry. Sorry.

2006-05-14T18:48:00.000-06:00

Evolution (for Mom)

I knew You then,
before the Beginning,
before Seperation,
when You were my Soul
and I was your Soul.

Then we emerged,
from the endless ocean
of Compassion
to the smaller ocean
of your Womb.
Room enough to grow another
droplet of the One Soul.

Then we emerged,
from the small ocean
of your Womb
to the larger ocean
of the World,
a harmony, now seperated
into two notes:
and a new sound rung
in Creation.

Tones vibrate with years,
the pitch in our ears
going red to ultraviolet
and beyond.
But this harmony now,
of your soul and
mine,
has always been Love,
God-blessed and
Divine.

Some Old Stuff

2006-05-06T13:43:00.000-06:00

So, I'm cleaning out my room, paring down the junk, and I found some old poetry on a few 3.5 in. floppies. Some of it's embarrassing, but a few I still like. So, here ya go.

Afterwards

Tonight, she is a pepper stuffed with romance.
Outside a glass pane, light rain falls on her
horse, the street, a Pinto maybe.
She will not release doves tonight, the closet door closed,
inside cooing avian dreams.
She will not watch seeds and sea water
down the shower drain trickling, or put on her
good silk dress, red spaghetti straps.
Only lie here, knees curled
against her breast, dreaming vegetable gardens and sunshine
and children.

Peyette County

Two charred logs lay like lovers on the shore of a
river in Peyette County.
They embrace between limbs as we fly by on Idaho
highways, cutting across flame blue skies
And fields that grow nothing, yet, race towards bounty.

An oven of northwest sun is baking fly guts on the windshield.
It heats me to sleeping, then waking, then
sleeping again.
Now it’s Dave and I in Idaho, highway shaking our battered
Honda fenderless
Streaked windows showing movies of small towns
and untended farms.

Later, a fish jumps, scares the shit out of me, smashing back
black into black.
Then black becomes gray haze as the sun rises on another Boise day.
My thoughts turn to damns and concrete, spawning paths blocked as we pass
judgment on roadside clearcuts.
Nearby, some future roadkill is no doubt waiting in the wings of disaster,
And in Peyette County they’re lined up shoulder to shoulder,
waiting for the salmon to come back.

A funeral for the grass

Good grass,
no one could ever say different.
Green and pleasant,
cool and moist
We’ll miss this grass,
but we’ll cut it down
just the same.

The Evidence

You have Bar-B-Q sauce on your beard,
like a blood trail leading to your mouth.
Evidence of the recent atrocity
that went on there.

Sonnet #38

The great men of these times are all lushes.
What kinds of heroes are those?
And if they’re not drunks, they have "intern-al" crushes,
Or else like to powder up their nose.
What is a person to think in such times?
When geniuses have all been arrested.
If this what becomes of all those great minds,
Should I hope that I never get tested?
Those in power are corrupted, crazy and dim witted,
Beholden to a few, while raping the masses.
In elections, Tweedledum against Tweedledee is always pitted
To think it’s fair, you must wear pretty dark glasses.
Our world’s in the shitcan, there just ain’t no denyin’
Now you can do somthin’ ‘bout it, or you can spend your time cryin’.

Do poetry and politics mix? Well, not when the execution is this ham-fisted, yikes!

9 Years and Counting...

2006-04-28T16:10:00.000-06:00

So, as you may have noticed, we're quickly sneaking up on our 10 year reunion. Now, Z-dawg and I have already talked about this and he is of the opinion (and I have to say I concur) that no one we'd really like to see and catch-up with will be there (Paul Goldhammer and Thad Hardy, for instance) so why go? Gjee, I don't know what your plans are but I'd like to propose a third option (going and not going being options 1 and 2):

Alternate 10 year reunion in a location yet to be determined. One of us, I nominate the bubbly girl, procures access to the list of contacts from whomever is organizing the official reunion, and then we get ahold of those deemed worthy for our "Best of 97" reunion and actually maybe enjoy ourselves while going through this cultural right of passage.

What say you comrades? Shall we reunite and conquer?

Is There Room for Renunciation in Liberal Religion?

2006-04-03T23:03:00.000-06:00

This is the, I don't know what, sermon I guess (presentation maybe) anyway, the whatever I gave at the Unitarian-Universalist Fellowship Meeting on Sunday, April 2, 2006.

There was once a beautiful lake filled with pure clean water. The lake was surrounded on all sides by rugged, almost impassable mountains. Over the mountains, on one side of the lake was a small village. The people there lived very hardscrabble lives, eeking out the barest of existences. For you see, the only water source for miles around was the lake. And so every day, people from the village would take their buckets and jugs and climb the treacherous mountains, descend to the lake on the other side, fill their containers and return over the mountains to the village. Often a good portion of the water would be spilled on the way back or polluted with dirt and debris, for the trail was exceedingly steep and difficult.

Now, there was an old aqueduct, a water pipe, that went through the very mountain. One end of the pipe was submerged deep in the waters of the lake and the other came out of the mountainside nearby the village. No one could remember who had put the pipe there and certainly no one had ever seen any water issue from it. Most people believed that the pipe only went a short ways into the side of the mountain, and had not considered that its other end might reach the waters of the lake. And there was no reason to think that it might, for the old pipe was so jammed with dirt, leaves, rocks and other sediment that not a drop of water had been able to traverse its length for generations.

Every day the aqueduct watched the people of the village, as they struggled so hard to bring water from the lake. After many years of observation the pipe thought to itself,

“Look at these people, how hard they struggle for just a few drops of water! And here I am, with one end totally submerged in the precious liquid these unfortunate ones work so hard for, and the other emerging here in their barren land. Would that the water might flow through me to them and thus ease their suffering.”

And so, from that day forward, the aqueduct decided that it would clear itself of all the dirt and debris that had clogged it up for so long. And slowly, ever so slowly, it began to work the sediment and detritus out of itself, some spilling out on the hillside near the village, some dissolving into the pure waters of the lake. To be sure, the process was tedious and time consuming, for water pipes are not in the habit of physical action, but slowly, ever so slowly, the pipe began to cleanse itself. In the village some people began to notice the pile of debris collecting around the old pipe, and began to wonder what it might mean.

And then, one day, miracle of miracles, a tiny rivulet of water managed to make its way from the lake, all the way under the mountain, and emerge on the opposite end of the aqueduct, to fall tenderly and unnoticed onto the pile of sediment that had accumulated there. Another rivulet of water soon followed and then another, and after some time, the rivulets combined to become a trickle. The pipe, for its part, still worked tirelessly, slowly moving stones and sticks, dirt and leaves down to one end or the other of its length and then out. The water continued to trickle.

And then another amazing thing happened. As the water flowed through the pipe, it itself began to remove sediment. The water itself began to pick up particles of dirt and debris and spit them out the end of the pipe, thereby assisting in the work that was begun for its sake. And now the cleansing process became much quicker. Soon, through the combined actions of the water pipe and of the water itself, the pipe was almost fully cleansed of debris, and now the water flowed in a rush and not a trickle.

The people of the village had noticed the miracle when the trickle became a stream, and ever since then had been rejoicing and back-slapping over their good fortune. Some people were so overcome that they began worshipping the pipe, from which pure water now issued. Others simply gave thanks that they would no longer have to rise early and climb the mountains.

The purpose of renunciation is to clear ourselves of all debris and detritus, to wash out the sediment from our bodies and minds, to remove that which has prevented the divine light from pouring through us and into the world. The renunciate is one who has realized that it is by his own actions that he has become thus clogged, and who has determined, by his own actions, to become unclogged. The renunciate knows that she is like a dirty window, and the more dirt she can remove, the more light will pour through her and into the dark room of the world. The story attempts to put this into metaphorical language, but what does renunciation mean in more concrete terms?

There are many different types of renunciation. Probably the first one to spring to most of our minds is physical or material renunciation; the giving up of possessions and wealth. However, this is but one aspect of renunciation, and cannot be properly understood without understanding the others as well.

Another oft-mentioned form of renunciation is the renunciation of judgment. This thing is good, that person is bad, this person is excellent, that thing is horrible. The renunciate gives up this categorizing and judging, knowing that they stem only from her own finite and relative perspective, that they are not Truth, which she is seeking.

And it is the same for negative thoughts and emotions, for these too must be renounced as products of our own egotism and delusion. As one Hasidic tzaddic put it “who knows all or your faults or knows them better than you yourself, and do you not love yourself all the same?” By renouncing our attachment to and identification with our negative thoughts and emotions, we see that they are only the result of our own prideful ness and egotism, and have no more reality than a desert mirage. They are but waves passing over the surface of Mind, and we need not cling to them.

The one final aspect or type of renunciation is one which we have a hard time dealing with in this, our culture of progress and planning, that is the renunciation of the fruits of labor. This means to work without care for the result or outcome of that work. It seems a paradoxical admonition, to work but not to care for what the work leads to. If we didn’t care what the work would lead to, why would we be working at all? Still we are told, if we would become pure channels for the divine, we must renounce this attachment to the fruits of our labor.

And that, in reality is what the renunciate renounces, attachment, in all it’s forms. All the various forms of renunciation might be summed up in that. Sever all attachment to everything, whether that thing be material, mental, emotional, or an object of the will. The renunciates tell us that we must not even be attached to the thought of our own salvation or enlightenment.

But now the question arises, why? Why give up our attachments? Is it not our attachments that make us human, that anchor us in this world? If we are not attached to anything, will we not become cold and distant? The answer is that we must cut all our attachments so that we may become truly free. So long as we are attached to anything, whether outside ourselves or inside, it is as if we had strings tied to us. The strings of our attachments are pulled and we react. We are attached to our sense of self-worth, so we react when it is assaulted. We are attached to our car, so we react when someone compliments it. The more attachments we have, the more time we spend reacting. For most of us, most of our time is spent reacting to one attachment or another. And these reactions, it should be said, can be either positive or negative. But when we are reacting, we are not acting. To act, that is, to act freely, one must be calm, detached, able to see the situation for what it is and then to decide on the best course of action, without being pulled this way and that by every stimulus that assaults our senses. But there is no time for this in reaction, reaction is a reflex and to confuse a reaction with an expression of free will is like striking a person’s knee cap and saying they chose to kick. So long as we are attached, we cannot be free. To sever attachment then, is to sever the bonds that hold us down and constrain our actions.

St. Francis of Assisi referred to the body as “brother ass.” “I will feed him, I will wash him, I will take good care of him, but I am going to ride.” When we spend our time chasing after sense enjoyments and catering to the whims of bodily nature, we are letting the ass ride us, and how can this be anything but ridiculous and a little bit pitiful. The object of physical, material renunciation then is to end our attachment to, and our mistaken identification with, the body, so that we may ride it and not vice versa.

The mind is also an ass, that we may ride, or that we may allow to ride us. And just as laziness and physical indulgence are the reactions to bodily attachment, so are judgments and negative thoughts and emotions the reactions to mental attachments. Attachments to what we believe to be good, and right, to how we believe others ought to act; we with our finite and relative intelligences, mistaking our mind’s truth for the Truth. When we indulge in these judgments and emotions, we allow the ass of the mind to ride us. The purpose of renouncing them is to gain control over the mind, so that the mind may become a tool through which our soul may work in the world. A hammer is necessary for carpentry, to be sure, but it is the carpenter, and not the hammer, that decides where to pound the nail.

When we are attached to the fruits of our labor, when we look forward to the goal and desire its attaining, we also become slaves to something, slaves to the goal. To be attached to the goal, to the fruit of our labor, is to begin, even if ever so slightly, down the slippery slope of ends and means thinking. We will end by declining to do good things if they don’t seem to further our goal, and by consenting to do bad things, if they do. Attachment to the fruits of labor puts a constraint on present action, and so binds us and negates our freedom. By renouncing the fruits of labor, we allow ourselves to act always in accord with our highest, that is to say, our most loving, impulses, without thought for a future that was never more than a dream anyway.

And all of this simply means to extract from ourselves every vestige of selfishness. Selfishness is based on an illusion, and so it is a chain for us. The illusion is this: that this body, this mind, these opinions, these things are who I am. And yet the body changes, generation after generation of cells growing and dying before we too cast off the mortal coil. The mind changes as we grow, our opinions change, our possessions change, and yet we remain somehow the same. The essential reality of our being then, must be separate from all these things. The illusion is that we identify with all of these things, these transient and dependent things, and so blind ourselves to our True Self, which is Soul, which is God, which is Love and Goodness unadulterated, everlasting and independent. To free our self of this illusion, to break this chain, is the purpose of renunciation. We hear the word renunciation and we are a little afraid , for we think we shall have to give up something, but is it right that the prisoner be afraid when asked to give up his cell? But many are the inmates who prefer the comfort and routine of the penitentiary to the infinite possibilities that await on the other side of the wall.

And we must not think that renunciation is solely the domain of monks and saddhus. One need not flagellate herself or take vows of silence to become a renunciate. Even the householder, the working mother or stay-at-home dad can practice renunciation. All that is necessary is that she set herself to the task of removing selfishness and everything else will follow. For what happens as we slowly begin to cut the bonds of attachment? That small voice, that some call conscience, that is usually drowned out by the shouting our attachments, that is, the shouting of our selfishness, seems to become louder, or maybe it is that the room has become quieter, but either way, our actions begin more and more to align themselves with the pure intent of the Soul. And then our very actions become an aqueduct, bringing the pure life-giving water of our Souls into the parched landscape of the world. And as the nature of our Soul is Love, so the nature of our actions becomes loving, and this love too, will aid in the work of renunciation. For when Love flows through us, all attachments are broken, at least temporarily. For what mother would not renounce all for her beloved child, without even a second thought, and with no difficulty whatsoever.

Which brings us to an interesting point, which is that in the end, renunciation destroys itself. The renunciate ends, as it were, by renouncing even his renunciation, for there is no longer any need for it. Swami Vivekananda puts it this way. Attachment is like a thorn buried in our flesh, and renunciation is another thorn that we use in order to remove the first. But when the first thorn is removed, then both are thrown away. When all attachment has been severed then even renunciation itself is unnecessary, for we are no longer pulled by the strings of attachment. We rest calmly in the embrace of the Soul, using each thing that comes to us as an instrument for pure intent of the Soul, without being moved by the instruments themselves. It is at this point, and this point only, that the renunciate has achieved the goal of being in the World, but not of it.

And now, I must answer the question that forms the title of this service. Is there room for renunciation in liberal religion? The answer I propose, as you may have already guessed, is yes. But first perhaps I should explain what I mean by “liberal religion”. By “liberal religion” I mean those people, of whatever denomination, sect or belief system, who are concerned more with the content of the religious experience than the particular forms that it happens to take. These people, are to be found, I hope, here, in Unitarian-Universalism, as well as in Christianity, Islam, Buddhism, Hinduism, Shamanism or any of the various other brands of spirituality. It is these people, I would claim, who are the true fundamentalists, who are concerned only with the fundamentals of their religion, which has always been and always will be, the realization of God in Man, and the outpouring of God into the world through Man. The end of all spirituality is the end of all selfishness, and this is also the end of renunciation. To end selfishness means to become a pure channel, a spotlessly clean window, through which the Divine Light may pour into the World. As the Hasidim say, “in a man who is full of himself, there is no room for God.” If we would keep the true flame of religion and religious experience alive in this our ever-darkening world, we must take up the task of renunciation, we must make room.

need life advice

2006-03-23T14:38:00.000-07:00

This isn't a poem.
Though maybe
I could write it like
one.

I'm interviewing for a position
in South Korea next month.
And then maybe I'll move there
in June.

That's all.

What do you think?

Two Attempts

2006-03-17T21:20:00.000-07:00

Ok, so first off, these are both a little cornball, I know, but for some reason, form poetry just seems to bring out the cheese in me. I don't know why, maybe Billy Joel can explain it to me. And secondly, they're both theistically themed, so to type. That's just where I'm at these days. I tried to make the Shakespearean one a little more philosophical, but it just came out as devotional love mysticism-type stuff. So here you go:

(oh, and grey, by the way, I think any type of form poetry will suffice at this point !-) )

#1

Hindu and Hasid praise Your name,
Each one coming, a tongue of flame,
To preach and unite, to burn and reclaim.

Christian and Taoist are one in this,
Prefering You to all earthly bliss
Turning away from all eathly gifts.

Moslem and Buddhist on this can agree,
That You are present in all that we see
That You are the truth that sets us free.

And what are You but my own true I,
The I of everything under the sky,
And above it too, where planets fly.

#2

My love is shaped like river bends,
Her breasts, like hills, do rise and sway,
Her hair's like seaweed and cattail ends
That shake and quiver around the bay.
Her eyes are sapphire, black and gold,
Her lips a whisper of forgotten dreams,
Hands butterfly-soft and crystal cold,
And upon her vestment no marring seams.
Sometimes she laughs when I call her name,
Sometimes a sigh and she turns away,
Sometimes she responds, and with joyous refrain
Forgetting ourselves, like children we play.

My Love, never aging, never dying, complete
My Life and my Soul I lay down at your feet.

2006-03-08T14:03:00.000-07:00

[whir] [blip] and tape slides past the magnet’s face
and data numbered zero one creates

The World, these Feet, Identity, this Space
a Map of Self, of Moons, Tectonic Plates.
What wonder’d Feats shall I perform for Thee?
To tear through Mounts of Rock or Flesh; perhaps
a Computation of untold Degree?

One zero fires: a synapse [pops] and [snaps].
A program seethes amongst its spools of tape.

This dust atop my Skin grows thick. Neglect
by Silence. I see Focus shift, reshape
towards Endeavors I cannot dissect.
I’ve counted Time on Teeth and Cogs –I know
Our Chemistries are borne of diff’rent Ores.

Assingment #3

2006-02-25T20:54:00.000-07:00

Ok, the assignment from Josh, since we all seem to be on this poetry kick, is this: Write one sonnet, your choice of theme, but it's got to fit the Shakespearean form, i.e. iambic pentameter (or close to it) with an abab cdcd efef gg rhyme scheme. I'll start with an example that I composed some years ago.

Let us not weep for our departed dead,
Our cries and tears cannot help them now.
No, let us weep for ourselves instead
We who remain here to toil and plow.
We for whom life may still hold in store
Pain and anguish, disillusionment and dread,
We mired in filth, we overrun with gore,
No, let us not weep for our departed dead.
Let us be jealous of their easy fate,
Let us hope that we soon too shall follow.
Let us not upon death, but on life turn our hate,
This life made of dumb cruelty, this existance so hollow.

Sweet death is reward for a life lived in pain
And only in ignorance do we wish the dead live again.

You may notice that not all the lines are exactly 5 iambs, they range from 4.5 to 5.5, but you get the idea.

2006-02-17T19:14:00.000-07:00

You see this? This is me. This is how I feel. Who's been abandoned now? You're not dead in my eyes yet, but the ICU nurse says things aren't looking good.

2006-02-07T00:05:00.000-07:00

overheard at the Oval this afternoon:

"Nothing makes you feel sexy like a RASH."

(real vociferous on that last part)

Four Kinds of People

2006-02-06T12:03:00.000-07:00

The other presents itself to us as a series of traits or characteristics. Now, these traits, in and of themselves, are neither good nor bad. It is like when a stone tumbles down a cliff. The fact of the stone tumbling is neither good nor bad, it simply is. However, if we happen to be standing below the tumbling stone, and if it smites us, we label the stone's tumbling bad. But if it is our enemy who happens to stand in that unlucky spot, and to be smited by the stone, and not us, then we label the stone's tumbling good.

So it is with the other. The characteristics of the other are neither good nor bad, they simply are. But some of the other's characteristics cause us pleasure and we label them good, while other characteristics displease us, and we label them bad.

And so the other presents itself to us as a bundle of good and bad characteristics. Now the question arises, how will we react to these characteristics, which we have labeled good and bad? We could emphasize the negative characteristics of the other and despise them on that account, or we might give more heed to the positive characteristics of the other and choose instead to love. Or we might seek a more balanced approach, and love the other for their good while despising them for their bad.

In this respect we might say, in Talmudic fashion, that there are four kinds of people in this world: those who love the other for the characteristics they label good and despise them for the characteristics they label bad are called common; those who despise the other for the bad and pay no heed to the good are called blind; those who love the other for their goodness and feel compassion for their badness are saints; those who love the badness in the other and despise their goodness are wicked.

A New Theory of Everything

2006-02-02T21:22:00.000-07:00

Or: What’s Really Holding the Universe Together (Five Theories)

Arbys’Horsey Sauce

Brad and Angelina

The Eagles

Strings Made of Even Smaller Strings

Oprah

2006-01-31T06:32:00.000-07:00

He thinks his life a mess.
The market down,
the girlfriend left,
and now they've gone and turned the fountain off,
to save the pipes from winter.
But he doesn't know
somewhere a girl,
no more than six,
sits with a pile of rocks
and a hammer
and with her mother and brother
slowly turns stones to gravel.

desire

2006-01-31T06:26:00.000-07:00

...and still,
this desire lies buried
in my breast:
a woman, a love of one's own.
but what love is this
that seeks to grab
and not to give?
what love is this that says:
"mine, mine"
"mine and no other's"?

Shanti

2006-01-31T06:01:00.000-07:00

"God place, this."
And still the army came,
who'd have thought, to run up hills
and sweat. Everyone comes
here, eventually. Even guns love
peace. Still they question
and point barrels to sky.

I cower with the Germans,
genetic predisposition
against militaristic displays of
force, but they don't fire
and we laugh and don't know
why. After two days
even the army left.

"Peace place," this tree, this
Mandir, this Kuti, this smoke
and wind to blow the smoke away.
The tree hails "Salaam!" to all
a yellow Ohm, and from the Kuti
Baba is calling, "Come, sit."
Be free, if only for this moment.

Everybody comes here, eventually,
even if they don't know why.
Baba knows...and smiles
a finger to his brown nose and a
raspy laugh, a gleam in his brown eye.
The army runs time trials up the hill and
Baba sits.

The tourists come and go, the locals
come and go, the army, the film crew,
the dancers and me too,
we come and go. "God place,
this." Baba came once
and stayed, but after two days
even the army left.

break

2006-01-19T18:53:00.000-07:00

If he could sew the stars into a hem
or fold the thin lining into an origami bird

he might be able to wear this suit,
standing up. This is a business

lunch, for business people. Inside,
the tough work of money assures

that everyone washes their hands.
Outside, the good dream of dreams still exists.

abandoned!

2006-01-13T15:55:00.000-07:00

OK, I'm feeling a bit left behind here because no one else has contributed since Ginger's assignment.

...so here's a new assignment (if that's what it takes to garner contribution):
write a brief (5-8 line) poem about this picture:

...and a happy new year (though slightly used at this point)

2006-01-06T08:53:00.000-07:00

my wasted lunch hour...

2005-12-30T12:52:00.000-07:00

...as drawn with microsoft paint.

in a cartoon blink

2005-12-27T15:36:00.000-07:00

It starts here and ends there with no between. A swing, a
dodge and the sweat drops that shoot from invisible pores

in our hero's pale pink forehead. Fountain Water.

Connect the dots. It's sudden when you slow it down. One cell
then another and a slight augment in the position of my jaw.

I'm saying something, can't you hear me? Watch.

It was Einstein who fanned his fingers before his eyes and broke down
time, divided the swish of a skirt and the arc of fountain water.

Connect the dots, don't blur them.

Big and Long

2005-12-22T16:47:00.000-07:00

The commerical on PBS (for PBS)
says the universe has no edge and
no center, and I can accept this, I suppose,
as I accept the fact that those
three hariy lobes I see drawn out on computer
paper (by the computer) are, in fact,
composed of a line infinitely long
(the Mandelbrot set)

I was taught to believe that
the universe is infinitely large, and always
thought that if that were true then every-
thing must exist somewhere, though
I may have picked that up
some place (Douglas Adams) but I
still think it's true. And I
wonder sometimes if somewhere in that
set, traced out along that infinite line,
my face, self-similar: two ears
and a chin.

It must be,
we all exist somewhere, in the universe,
in that line, and sometimes I wonder
what it means that the one infinity
(mandelbrot set) is contained within the
other (universe), and that here I sit,
contemplating it all, another infinity
(me), and what if someone is watching the one
infinity (universe) like we're watching
the other (set).

Sit and wonder,
Wonder and sit,
What else can a body do?

What else can a body do?

∞

2005-12-20T17:54:00.000-07:00

∞
The length of my arm
contains as many points
as the length of this world.
You can run a ruler across
any star, moth, galaxy, hip
and find the same thing over
and over.
But then, you know how
Mathematicians talk,
their dark hope for the world.

Still, it isn’t an impossible
thing to understand. This isn’t
just Zeno’s mystery or Kepler’s solution.
The 2nd law of Planetary Motion
does not depend on what
cannot be imagined.

Twist a rubber band
and you have it.

Anticipate a new thing.

Say something you can never
take back.

2005-12-20T16:10:00.000-07:00

infinity.
what more
can one say?

for people with time on their hands

2005-12-19T13:49:00.000-07:00

I've been reading Daivd Foster Wallace's book "Everything and More: A Compact History of Infinity." I can't recommend it, as the book will cause you to stay up nights wondering how, if a second of time can be infinitly divided, you'll ever make it to morning. BUT, I do think we should all post (that is, write) poems about infinity. Who's up for it?

It worked!

2005-12-15T12:11:00.000-07:00

I'm blogging! I'm blogging!

Haiku while walking to work

2005-12-09T20:37:00.000-07:00

River's moss,
green in summer,
now white with frost.

something new and untitled from me

2005-12-06T14:41:00.000-07:00

Just open, the electric door hangs
offline, fuse-blown, but still
a border unlatched
between this room and the next. No one
invited you to notice, you just
did as if you couldn’t control
yourself, as if the door commanded
a gravity the velocity
of your thoughts could not
escape, were caught by, made
its satellite. But it’s only
a door and that is only
a shadow – the shadow. The
shadow of your neighbor stealing
light from the braided oval
rug, from the dark wooden floor, but
she’s giving some of it back, she’s
wearing a pink blouse and it’s
giving itself to the ceiling
and now the room is
steeped in that hue, or is it her
perfume, no wait
that’s your perfume. It’s your
blouse too and your shadow, the only
one in this room except for the electric
door still choking light
back from that
other room, beyond.

A sound like your footsteps, like
your neighbor’s pert cough, curls out
from the floorboards in a room
older than this but no less finished,
or broken, or useful.

2005-11-29T10:30:00.000-07:00

This Was Supposed to be a Poem About Snowflakes v/2.0

There is no hope in youth,
only fading, nor comfort in age,
only failing. We cling to sand
and pray for rain, and don't you know
every prayer is answered?

There is no safety in numbers,
only grasping, nor contentment in love,
only asking. We tell our children to share
and fill our houses with greed, and don't you know
every hypocrisy is a tiny cell of cancer?

There is no Truth in opinion,
only thinking, nor Wisdom in judgement,
only speaking. We lie to ourselves
and forget that we lied, and don't you know
of all Liars who is the master?

There is no Love in our love,
only clinging, nor fondness in distance,
only ringing. We name our fear Love
and hide Love in the basement, and don't you know
we cover the basement door with plaster?

There is no Peace in the world,
only waiting, nor efficacy in action,
only praying. We send up prayers for change
and we remain the same, and don't you know
every prayer we send is answered?

Two Haikus

2005-11-24T20:37:00.000-07:00

Haiku for the Coquettish Waistrel Pictured Below

Life is meaningless,
God, no one understands me,
Try to look sexy.

Haiku on the Occasion of Thanksgiving Day, 2005

Thankful for a bed,
slept, I could have ate instead,
Million turkeys dead.

Blog This

2005-11-23T21:14:00.000-07:00

Thanksgiving haiku for Joey

2005-11-23T15:25:00.000-07:00

pine cone centerpiece:
the territorial flag
of a meal conquered

Pinky

2005-11-17T06:50:00.000-07:00

To live inside a colored womb,
a pink astronaut fleshy
and fragile, soon to be expelled
to spaceship earth from inner space
a wet cocoon, a smushed face
and tiny fingers in the picture
and tiny fingers and smushed face
and dad that day in the waiting room
'cause they wouldn't let him in
this soon or maybe he didn't want or was
camping with a friend.
Floating in fixed
space, milk and honey flowing in floating
and floating and then...

And time and world rushing in
and where did my ocean of honey go?

Mother is food and rootedness and self, we end in
eachother and have no end.
In eachother a wealth of love and
warm mommy-juice to float in is self and love
without end.
Mother is Goddess, is Lover, is Friend,
is Spaceship and Space.
Pinky in space in Mother in space in Mother
in space, millions floating and loving,
a race of pink astronauts, another world
close as stretched-tight skin, made of love and wonder,
but we have only cameras
to look in.
What happened to heart-eyes, Mother?
Were they cut with umbilical cord, can we learn
to use them again?
If I say the right words will you let me fly back
to that cocoon,
fleshy, warm and
soon?

2005-11-09T20:14:00.000-07:00

As the hand held before the eye hides the tallest mountain, so this small earthly life hides from our gaze the vast radiance and secrets of which the world is full, and whoever can take life from before his eyes, as one takes away one's hand, will see the great radiance within the world.

-from Ten Rungs: Collected Hasidic Sayings
Martin Buber

What happens when we take away the hand from before our eyes? That is, what happens when we step back from our own suffering, our own pain, and see it in the context of all the suffering and pain with which the world is full?

When we hold our personal dramas and tragedies before our eyes, we become blinded, in a way, to the outside world. For while we see the pain and suffering around us, it seems to us inconsequential compared to that pain which is all the time held before our eyes. Our own pain seems a gargantuan mountain, before which the mountainous pain of the world shrinks, almost to nothing.

When we take away the hand from before our eyes; that is, when we see that it is just our hand held before our eyes, and not a mountain, as we once suspected; when we see rightly; then the fathomless mass of all the suffering in the world presents itself to us and our own suffering receeds, almost to nothing.

With our hand held before our eyes, the world seemed filled with pain: our own. When we take away our hand the world again seems filled with pain: that of all the others in the world.

Before there is pain, after there is pain. So what did it avail us then, to remove our hands, since our world was, and still is, suffering and suffering?

The suffering, however, is not the same.

When we hold our hand before our eyes we suffer because we sense that there is a lack, that something is missing. And because we see only ourselves, we sense that something in ourselves is missing. This sense of lack creates our first suffering. But then we suffer again, for we also sense that it is beyond our power to fill this need. For if it were within our power to fill this need then surely we would have filled it already. We suffer because we feel a space within us and then we suffer because we can find no way to fill this space. We suffer because we realize that we will never be able to relieve our own suffering.

But when we pull back our hand and our eyes see rightly, then we are confronted by the suffering of all the others in the world; we sense that something is lacking in the world. We feel the world's need now, instead of our own. But while we could see no way of easing our own suffering, now we see an infinitude of ways in which we may ease the suffing of others. Here is a need we can fill! For while no one may lighten his own load, each may lighten the load of his brother, if only in some small degree.

And the miracle is this: in filling the need of others, we find our own need filled. And this is "the great radiance within the world".

Suppose

2005-11-05T06:53:00.000-07:00

"Supposing truth is a woman--what then?"
-Friedrich Nietzsche, Beyond Good and Evil

Suppose truth is a woman--then what?
Suppose you call her late at night and she doesn't want to talk to you.
Suppose you're a little drunk when you call and she hangs up on you and
when you call her back
she doesnt' answer...

Suppose truth only looks like a woman
and you don't find out till later that those tits you fell
in love with
--immediately, deeply--
were only water balloons, and you feel a bit silly,
falling in love with water balloons,
but you buy some the next day, just to see...

Suppose truth is a lesbian who doesn't want anything to do with you
romantically,
but does think you're a great guy and gives you a big hug
every time she sees you...

Suppose truth isn't a lesbian at all but nonetheless
wants nothing to do with you
romantically.
Or worse, only pretends to be a lesbian
when you're around...

I Woke Up A Cello

2005-10-29T12:55:00.000-06:00

I woke up a cello
today, breathing heavy
chords into my
cloistered room, feeling
reverberations
through my awkward
wooden body.
Pausing
to rest from
an exhausting kind of

movement, a
tremor, you
wash into my thoughts
from recurrent and
flitting streams. Here,
I could tell you, talk
to you, about this, how
this feels, not this body, but
this as in a found

despair for language, for
rhythm. And this, as in
my, incarnation, dusty with dry
resin, prostrate in
these swollen chords. I
know that cracked and
jaundiced ceiling, the
rasp and tenor of my
voice. I can hear
you hunched over
the bathroom
sink proclaiming that,
sometimes, there's no
trusting how you
feel or, at the
very least, the reasons
you're given. But I
said that or I thought it
before, before

this. I've stayed calm for as
long as I could, felt
collected as far
down as my skin would
go, now this
shell, but under that
tossing as a feverish
sleep, muscle,
bone, and nerves shifting
hot and cold. My
voice gives me
away that tremble, now
tremolo, stitched to my
answer.

2005-10-28T08:32:00.000-06:00

When you're trying to make yourself a better person, there are two yous involved (at least). There's the you you are, and then there's the you who wants to make you better and who does make you better. There's the you that gets worked on and the you that does the work, right? So which you is You?

I think the first you, that is, the you that gets worked on, isn't really you at all. It's what we've grown to think of as you (or me), it's what everyone says our you is but really, I think, it's just our personality, our ego. It's a conglomeration of traits and habits, virtues and vices, prejudices and pre-planned performances through which we interact with the world, but that's all it is. Our personality, our ego, our "self", can change, yet we remain the same. My habits have changed, my virtues and prejudices are different today than they were on the day we graduated highschool, but I am still me. I haven't changed at all, in some way. In some way I am exactly the same as I have always been, underneath all that exterior stuff. I am me, no matter what my personality or my ego "looks" like.

So what am I then? If I'm not the you-that-gets-worked-on, then I must be the you-that-works.

But what is this you? The first you was easy. We all know that you. It's the you that you and I know, the you that our employers and coworkers and friends know, the you that our families and loved ones know, but that you is no you at all. The real you lies underneath the surface one, the real you is the ideal that is constantly critiquing and working on and forming the surface you, the personality. The real you is insightful and wise, seeing the proper way in every situation. The surface you is blind and dumb, constantly stumbling over itself. This is why the real you is always working on surface you, ever trying to form it in its own image. The real you is conscience, the surface you is superstition.

The real you is the ideal you, the perfect you. The surface you is the imperfect reflection of the ideal you in the material world. The real you is a force, always pushing, the surface you is a substance, ever resistant. It is between this pushing and resisting that human lives are lived.

Our folly is that we cling to the imperfect reflection and ignore the ideal. We attach ourselves to and identify ourselves with the surface you, the personality, and thus deny the real you. When we do this, we lose our insight, and then we count our blindness a blessing and call it sight. In our ignorance, we mistake our ignorance for wisdom.

The court jester who plays at catching his shadow is surely comedic, but the poor fool who with real passion attempts to restrain his shadow is just as surely tragic. Still, all of us engage in such tragic foolishness. The surface you is ever changing and therefore unreal. Its being is contingent upon an infinity of variables and is therefore relative. The real you is unchanging and absolute, its being is contingent upon nothing. The surface you demands one thing today and another thing tomorrow, the real you demands only one thing, constantly: "be good" . The surface you is like clay that, without a sculptor to give it shape, has no form of its own. Our fault is that we forget the sculptor and think we are nothing but clay. The real you is not the clay, the real you is the sculptor, the real you is the you-that-works, the real you is God (no joke) and this is why it is written that God makes man in his own image.

And the Lord God said unto Israel, "You shall be Holy for I, your God, am Holy."

2005-10-26T13:00:00.000-06:00

In a fit of faux-anonymity, I've changed my username. I just thought I'd fit in a little better with the theme that seems to have developed.

...poem is forthcoming.

2005-10-24T12:27:00.000-06:00

Blah...

An aimless feeling has been hovering over me for the past few weeks. I'm having trouble shaking it. I had put the grad school master plan on hold, thinking that it was a better time to get some grounded, meaningful job to satiate my conscience and my bank account. Now that I'm in a not-so meaningful job and I realize that everyone here is chasing a graduate degree, I 'm feeling compelled to resume the original plan. I don't know. Anyway...

Presently, my workday afternoons are riddled with clandestine moments of pilfering candy from coworker's desks and writing emails or contributing to this blog under the auspices of performing legitimate work. I'm not really important enough around here for anyone to actually care, which works for me. The people are nice and I enjoy getting to know them, but sometimes (like now) that's not enough.

Anyway, I'll be posting a poem soon. Let me know what you think of it. It was written a long time ago and remains the only poem I've penned that I'm not destructively critical of. Don't go easy on it.

OK, I'm going to go shred some paper now...

2005-10-21T08:02:00.000-06:00

The hottest thing since that time Doyle's dog tried to hump the tall kid who lived down the street!

2005-10-20T12:38:00.000-06:00

No Rise in Minimum Wage
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
Published: October 20, 2005

WASHINGTON, Oct. 19 (AP) - Two proposals from Democrats and Republicans to raise the minimum wage to $6.25 an hour were rejected on Wednesday by the Senate, making it unlikely that the wage, $5.15 an hour since 1997, will rise in the foreseeable future.

In the ideal world (according to me):
Members of Congress shall be paid minimum wage during their freshman term and recieve a wage increase (25 cents for house, 75 cents for senate) every re-election (read: positive performance review by electors). Overtime rules apply, but it is the responsibility of the House Speaker and Senate President to meet wage quotas and curb overtime.

Committee chairman and party leaders (whips included) are exempt from overtime rules and recieve $1 more per hour in addition to their level of pay.

House Speaker and Senate President recieve yearly salaries comensurate with modal national salary at their experience level in that particular leadership position (i.e. entry-level).

Previous government or leadership experience is not applicable to wage or salary considerations.

2005-10-20T08:48:00.000-06:00

homeless guy on couch,
deep books lying all around.
hard philosophy.

2005-10-18T15:24:00.000-06:00

a blue ink doodle
scratched into a thin margin
-how time is spent here