Month: May 2013

Astonishingly, Obama has declared a proxy war on Christianity, in what is arguably one of the most religious groups in the country, the Armed Services.  Here is one link.

They hired themselves a bigot, who does nothing all day but hate on the religiously adherent.  What is the game? 

Obviously, in a general way, the goal of all Leftists (Cultural  Sadeists) is to destroy any coherent social structure outside the relationship of the isolated individual with the State.  Religion and tradition generally are both enemies to be destroyed.  As I have said, in my view the inner core of the gay marriage push is to denigrate and marginalize traditional family structures outright.  Gay marriage has NO history anywhere in recorded history, anywhere on the planet, and now we are supposed to consider it a fundamental right.  It is not.

Specifically, though, I think the Left has realized that for any coup to succeed you have to have the military on your side. There is no other way, and DHS cannot make up for this gap.  Logically, then, why not wage a war on religion, and by extension on all social conservatives?  By a process of gradual elimination, people more open to radical new political forms may take over the ranks.

I cannot say if this is an intelligent strategy, but it appears to be the one being pursued.  It would seem to me that a large backlash is quite possible among those who choose to stay in, particularly if ably led by senior command officers, who if capable of war-fighting, one would hope would also have the balls to defend the basic rights of their troops, which would include free social interaction, and the freedom to speak of religion, which has provided countless soldiers over millenia with much needed comfort.  Even the SERE books used to speak of the manifest and much tested value of a belief in God in surviving extreme situations.

Time will tell.

Buddhists posit three types of suffering–which as I have pointed out, consists both in actual felt pain, and unrealized, unsuspected, potential happiness/elevated experience.

The first type is what country singers and blues singers sing about.  It is poverty and following difficulty and resentment.  It is dishonesty in others.  It is being a double amputee.  It is hunger, both physical and emotional. It is all the felt sufferings of mind, body and spirit, which we call pain.

The second type is a sort of pooling of resistance and tension in response to change.  It is holding on to what is passing by.  It is disruptions in the smooth flow of breath because we want one thing to be true and not another.

The third type is the most subtle, what they call “conditioned existence”.  Put most simply, it is having a self that we want to retain, to hold on to.

I was listening to this series on Buddhism several weeks ago, and when he came to the part about conditioned existence, I inexplicably started sobbing, in a way I have not done in many years.  I was driving, and it was a bit inconvenient.  I nearly pulled over, but it passed.

Conditioned existence is feeling trapped by your history, unable to break free and fly.  It is in the very structure of your body, how you have learned to move in response to your particular psychosocial history. 

I watched a bird land on the very top branch of a tree last week.  Conditioned existence is that bird thinking that because it is on the top of the tree, that it has realized its full potential, and forgetting how to fly.
You can feel that shrinking, like plastic wrap in an oven.  Just because it is transparent, does not mean that it does not hold you.

We all live in cages.  We choose these cages because they provide our “four walls of freedom”, to paraphrase Merton.  But this is an illusion.  We were meant to roam open oceans, and fly in empty spaces.  It is fear that holds us back.  We create the walls. Those walls protect us from out there, from the knowledge of freedom.

I have been feeling like I am in a vast ocean lately, being tossed to and fro by waves.  We live in a world which even on the surface is in constant motion.  Often in my meditations, I find “memories” popping up of movies I have seen, which have the same or even greater emotive power than my own memories.  Who are we, if we consist even now in our inner core of someone else’s story?  Are we not, now, in large measure living someone else’s life?  And are those who create these stories, themselves, not living in world’s of fantasy?

The word guru, in Sanskrit, means “heavy”.  I have been feeling that I need to get deeper and deeper in this ocean, until I reach a point of rest, where the waves no longer move me here and there, often without me knowing, or even having any way of knowing, since there is no set comparison point.  Everything is in flux.  This is the experience of modernity, at least as they teach it in the universities.

What I have noticed, though, is that every time I do Kum Nye, something different happens, even with the same exercises.  Every time I start, I don’t know what is going to happen.  Sometimes it is very pleasant, and sometimes difficult emotions come out, like extreme anger. And it occurs to me it will ALWAYS be like this.

Part of the appeal of the Buddha in iconography (I will note in passing that the Buddha, in contradistinction to most Greek philosophers, is often, perhaps generally, pictured in his whole body, whereas the Greeks content themselves with busts; I will comment on this some other day) is his tranquility, the peacefulness and calm on his face.  We think to ourselves that he has passed beyond pain, to a state he can maintain without effort forever.  We think that you can finish the task of suffering on this earth.

I have decided this is an illusion.  The Buddha, rather than being in constant repose, was in fact in constant flux.  He accepted fully the vicissitudes of this life, and balanced himself relative to them a thousand times a second.  When he went deeply into meditation, what he saw was another beautiful realm in constant motion, and another realm even beyond that, beyond light, which itself is a form of gross matter.

The universe never stops.  Consciousness never stops.  Peace consists in accepting this.

The image I like is surfing.  A surfer can never master the ocean.  That is much too large.  What he or she CAN do is master the interaction, by consistently using to the fullest potential all the opportunities, the evanescent formations, granted them, in a skillful and diligent way.

I met the Devil again last night.  He tried to frighten me, tried to get me to join him, but I am far beyond that.  He does not scare me.  What I saw, though, is that he is the spirit of this world.  This Earth exists on a very primitive spiritual level, which exists as a proving ground for souls that need to learn basic lessons.  Just as a drill instructor has to be hard on his students, the Devil instills the possibility of all sorts of evils and temptations to humans.

I need him.  I need him as a goad to do better.  He is my ally, in important ways.  All that one can do in this world is offer an alternative to the status quo.  All one can do is offer an escape from the spirit of this world.  You cannot finally conquer evil, since it exists for a purpose.

Life is an adventure.  Every moment is an apocalypse and a new dawn.  Accept this, internalize it, then chase it like a child chases a kite.