The universe wants to fuck you.

This may sound like a bad thing. By the time you notice it could be a good thing, there’s all this resistance built up that probably should dissolve a bit before we can check out how good of a thing it is.

But just as struggling when the universe fucks you is deeply pointless ¹, unbuilding resistance through struggle never got me anywhere.

But to get back to the point: you, me, the universe. Wanna get it oan toniyeeite? That’s what all this talk about ‘the beloved’ is about, yesno? I’m sort of wary of the tendency to not take that word for a too literal image, ’cause it implies that fucking is something to be overcome. We’ll see, but for now, that seems like just another throwback to asceticism.

1) although it might appear sexy to some ²

2) really? who? or even, where?

It’s very dangerous to think about how to make life better (as opposed to e.g. how to have a better life), because you might start to feel encouraged to make other people’s life better too.

Living amongst a lot of humans of a purportedly lower civilizational level (according to at least two ideologies I know myself to have been way over-involved with in the unmourned past) has shown me the stupidity of believing that concepts like ‘civilizational level’ are remotely useful as a descriptor of humans. If you think you win something by categorizing, why not rank people according to niceness? (My neighbourhood wins.)

Relative to their power, there might not be that much difference in the amount of happiness/suffering the different civilizations have caused in other beings anyway. And if you think this can and should be measured, and you think the implications of those measurements can be analyzed and used to steer your actions, and predict how awesomely humanist the effects of those actions will be, well: good to know, because it’s good to know that you’re a cold blooded psycho crazy person from Looneyville, and I’ll politely avoid you.

I can do soma fine, I’m mildly able at emotional stuff, I’m good but terrifyingly finicky about identity, but as for matters of aliveness and vitality: weren’t never allowed to develop a clue, really. (Nor western culture, sad to say: that stratum of being is direly overlooked ’round these parts.) I feel like I’ve been dragged schlepped and yanked out of situations in which my vital body tried to show me what to do at that moment, by a lot of people who made it their business to save me from my dirty lazy dangerous self, way too many times. Oooh weren’t they being selfless for doing that, they thought, I suppose.

Weird that I touch at an image of a kind of fourfold organization of the human again after lo these many years. Well at least I’m not mistaking what identity is as fervently as ol’ Rudi. I hope.

Warranty for the life of humans

Sometimes, I feel absorbed in HereNow. This is a perception, and the perception is HereNow, and most of that is whatever is touching the senses of the human system. But the human system itself vanishes into a blind spot at the center of HereNow. When I look back at that system from my perch at the tropopause, it feels bafflingly tiny and laughably insignificant; like a swirl of scum flung off a wavelet on the ocean of Being. I feel a gulf of unknowingness between the vastly empty weight of Being and the deeply flimsy transience of what the human system identifies as, whether intentionality, body, choice, mind, or desire and so on. It seems unimaginable that humans can continue existing in that vacuum, under that weight; and impossible to understand why we haven’t exploded, or been crushed, respectively; or in the same happening.

Of course, there’s an ‘and yet’, and it goes like this: some of the things humans do are very awesome and feel very nice; quite as if their doing transcends their existential triviality. The ripples from the new patterns they somehow manage to cause to appear in the scum on the waves on the ocean of Being somehow manage to influence other patterns, sometimes they unstick (dukkha -> sukkha) a little bit of fluff that miraculously kept itself stuck in a pattern that felt unhappy or constrained, they cause a pattern of desire to become a pattern of satisfaction, they encourage new and exciting patterns of desire to emerge and so on. Be they doings of art or love, science or politics, I wouldn’t want to miss them, even if right now I can’t see how they can exist. And the damnedest thing of course is that they feel as if they cause the scum to feel more alive, they cause the transient chaos of living as humans to feel more grounded and open, they make the human pattern feel part of the ocean for a few moments, and in those moments trivial existence feels like it is essential being. I may be blinded by hope when I say this, but it feels like it makes the ocean capable of harbouring new patterns, new forms, new beings; and that feels decidedly non-trivial; also fun, healthy and good. Maybe the ocean doesn’t ultimately care (or maybe it does, who can tell, and it sure wouldn’t matter if someone can), but why not have fun healthy good things happening, even if the illusion of choice is just that.

So now my simple brain wants to know where this overly convoluted heap of waffling is leading and decides  to use it to have another crack at the hoary old dilemmas surrounding the (again, illusionary) questions of what ‘should’ ‘I’ ‘do’ and why. (By now I hope you get why I call those questions illusionary, right? Otherwise that’s what the comments are for. Hey didja know there’s a comment section? You can comment there. It’s fun! Healthy! Good! Do eet. Do eet noowwwww.) Alright, so there’s an unimaginable rift between what I’m in the habit of calling me and Being, but still, now what. Especially considering the fact that Being could crush me like less than a bug and nothing would be lost, nothing would change. Maybe we are after all ‘justified’ (rhetorically speaking) in assuming we have latitude to choose, hope, build, desire – Being hasn’t snuffed us out yet, so why not. We’ll have to assume that that’s as much of a warranty for the possibility of human life as we’re going to get, and right now, maybe that’s enough. Although looking at the world and what it suffers: barely; and we keep trying to cut it closer. So roll on the revolution. As long as I can dance, I’ll do my part. Looking forward to see yours, too.

Men and Women: Are they more Different than Alike?

Talking with (which means listening to, a lot of the time) ms. neighbour is adding a lot of flavour to my perception of gender and concepts of genderedness.
A different perspective is opening up when I take account of the possibility that in a lot of the different sectors of being (somatic, mental, sexual, spiritual etc.), humans might have pretty much equally big and full potential to live as a woman or as a man. The presupposition I appear to have accepted ’til now is that people inherently ‘center on some point of a 1-dimensional scale of gender’, which I often thought to be unconsciously (genetically, environmentally, socially) determined; and that just isn’t very compelling at all anymore – it still feels pretty ingrained though. E.g. (now when I think it out loud it’s kinda obvious) you can live somatically as a woman even though corporeally you’re a man. You essentially don’t have to do anything to prove worthy of this label, as long as your somatic being isn’t being a man, and it’s just an intellectual desire for you to have it be called feminine, in which case you’re just playing word games. This is possible because that’s how big genders are.
Now, I still suppose that it’s possible to call things womanly or manly, but one of the benefits of this perspective is that it seems impossible to me to judge a majority of the stuff we think about when we think about gender on the aforementioned linear scale, because this is quite emphatically not a linear scale anymore, femininity and masculinity are much more like two potentially completely interpenetrating clouds of sense and meaning and desire and good stuff, really.

Something you don’t like.

Right now, there’s something you don’t like. There are also other nows, and in some of them that something is absent. If you want to experience them, rejecting or denying or feeling patronizing about whatever it is that’s bothering you is the best way to lower your chances of that ever happening.

Oh about that horror…

That turned out to be about Kali. Ms. Neighbour introduced me to her, and she (Kali, not the bobbly one, well maybe her too but in a much nicer way I’d hope) wants to bite my head off, but then I get to bite off hers, so that’s alright. I don’t know if she’s round the bend enough to not even mind anymore if I’d call her a nice lady, so I’ll refrain. Of course, that’s not really an insightful way to refer to her either.

New policy: dump any draft.

Yes it’s true, I can draft however much I want but it’s been shown that I will not edit drafts into audience-friendly form on my own. Maybe later, or when I get enough complaints (hellooooho?). So here goes! Relax, read, enjoy, wonder WTF I’m on about this time, shoot me an email or a comment and I’ll feel invited to elucidate.

In some strains of neo-advaitic theory absolutism and/or nihilism is way too prevalent to feel healthy anymore. Particularly useless if making use of enlightenment for healing is attempted. Looking at you Byron Katie. (Isaac Shapiro I’m holding out hope for, smart dude that.) Also a so called enlightened world view that forgets who it is that spends all this time doing all this stuff that it (the view i.e.) busily keeps declaring illusionary or irrelevant is sort of cutely dumb.

But I seem to be getting on the scent of a fullness-transcendence that is an alternative to the emptiness thingy that advaitics teach. (-> explain fullness …)

Maybe a third kind, something to do with how awareness and body/fullness are the same – sounds blindingly obvious, but it’s hard to re manifest the feeling – it’s the androgynous third to the male emptiness / female fullness thing, sort of a purer creativity that doesn’t need the coming together of male and female to create.

How ‘you’ can do something to ‘get’ differently enlightened – if retraining your system isn’t doing something we need to talk about the definition of doing. Simply getting your system to stop perpetuating production as a means of evading the Being Here Now is an excellent activity, and if you tell me I can’t do that you’re probably confused who you’re talking to.

Somabile: carried by the body, as all this bullshit is after all, how could that hang together let allone carry itself by itself?

New subtitle from:… jjgo.

I’d be way more willing to offer myself (??? maybe make me active and the guru the sacrificer? to be edited) to a guru if I felt he had a feeling of humility and was willing to get close to me and give me stuff. (This means that I’d still be very unwilling to do that, it’s just that it seems like such a surreally dumb thing to do to me now.)

vereniging voor herintroductie van uitstervende woorden: kukelen.

I don’t know if dykes are more likely to be attracted to the side of me that I would most like to be attractive for, and I don’t know how much ms. neighbour identifies with her bisexual tendencies, but I’ll tell you that if she came and told me, to my face, that she’d like to maybe chow down on some pretty rug again sometime soon, I’d totally egg her on. (did you notice how I said ‘egg’? Yeah okay more witty than funny.)

Include sound clips, e.g. Jordan with the subtitle, there was something in the latest savage lurvecast, and that one percussion line in Votono was really cute. Would probably make the blog a lot more engaging.

Why I like to preach – how it could even be a valid urge.

The horror, and what might be fun about it.

For some vague reason* I’m beginning to feel interested in artistic expressions of grinding defeat and annihilation, like darkpsy, books like Gravity’s Rainbow, and of course: Use of Weapons by Iain M. Banks, which deserves its own post (later yeah right later). The inescapability of that mood used to feel very scary to me, but I’m starting to see a glimpse of release or devotion or, what’s Hingabe in English? in it too, now. (Could be all that hot sex I’ve been having over the last 36 hours.)

Inescapable doom could serve as an image of the hopelessness Chögyam Trungpa was talking about, for instance – the empty illusion of conscious intent. Or the horrific aspect of Warren Ellis’ work and blog, which is a great way to convince yourself that yes, all those nice things you see around you are just as transient as anything. They’ll rot and decay on their own time anyway, and it’s super easy to have your nice bits shattered, liquefied, maimed, or chewed off by aliens from Outside (where the Others come from). And of course there’s a heroism in accepting that certainty to such an extent that you take this othering influence into your own life and let it act out on your own body, so cross posts from Modblog never lose their relevance (not that I’m going to click through though).

Now for the theoretical part:

• emptiness and fullness
• samsara: emptiness doesn’t exist
• nirvana: fullness doesn’t exist
• tantra: emptiness == fullness ( == svabhavikakaya? some not very clear other kind of thing?)

*(cute, how each next word is one letter longer there)

Passing time

As always I was reluctant to choose which of his books I was going to re-read, because I dread the specific horrificness his excellent writing is going to seduce me into witnessing, but I’m re-reading Banks, Use of Weapons, possibly his best? Who cares. So and as always I want to quote at length, which I still might, but not now, because just now, I read a sentence fragment which seemed to sparkle with one of those little gleams of ‘transcendental’ or metaphysical (or whatever) insight for me: “… the identity of thought and passing time.”

Now there’s an idea. Time, the passing of it, the concept of time as something that passes, the concept of time; being identical with thinking. Not a cause and effect relationship, it’s not that time passes because I think; it’s like only when there’s thinking around does the tableau of the world manifest a kind of time that passes from the might-be into the over-and-gone.

I haven’t read up on any popular science lately so I’ll say I don’t know what I’m talking about right up front, but here we go anyway: how was that again with the proof that time has an arrow? Far as I know that’s accepted physics, although there’s a couple smart dissenters, e.g. Julian Barbour. Anyway, it suddenly became clear to me again that if time has an arrow it isn’t possible to show it exists from looking at sense experience, all you get from that is an opportunity to compare memory images and conclude that there’s different ones.