furry furnace

you were young
a thin black cat
feeling fire between
his eyes
a giddy mutant
smelling of smoke
and orchids
a mangy dancer in
moon dust
they threw bottles
at your head
threw spears of light
at the dark side of
man you never see
the face of man
on forest's floor
leaves of grass
bought by the ounce

then
through the sand
castles in their mouths
from the angelic
whispers of jesters
you heard the king's demands
you owed them guts
and fur
the fur your ancestors
wrapped around silent machines
in the night
and you gave up a thousand dream
bodies to gentle laughing lions
shaped your unbridled
entropy and
sniffed out alien mischief
in scorched fields
read horoscopes to particles
read sutras to lizards
but you couldn't shape
the world of squares

it busted up
the stars in your eyes
reeling in moebius ten strips
in a rollercoaster blooming
strange flowers all
the way down
no one really saw it
the distant planet
all it had was motion
and time
beauty blew through you
and swirled crackling
around the others
but you couldn't shape
the world of squares
the corpse of the Illuminati
still dancing on
strings held by
scared children

woe is the freakyheaded
child who loveslovesloves
even the boot heel pressed
into his heart
wild is the burst of light
the inflation
of smooth starry blowoffs
the byzantine puppets
of stardust grokking
how stars died for their
sinlessness
long gone lights of
true benevolence
asking for no penance
for they gave what
they came to give
and yet they called
to you
to pledge fealty
to beauty

you couldn't shape
what has no shape
you know it now
why you couldn't change
what is only change with
a face
you couldn't see it
until the faces all changed
giving generations
to the earth
life to the tomb
the mask dissolved in
its own energy
and you saw the true face
the face of nobody
the cool water that
a long year's desert
concealed in transparency
it was zen
and the bald-faced
love of a woman
of nobody
you are nobody's fool

now
you are young
a thin black cat
feeling fire between
his shoulders
nowhere to go today
but something's always
happening

The Terrible Dancer

Herr Doktoreo

cosmic cloaca

first blood

remember
sweet rocking breath
silver melodies
of being
unchained nameless
desert sands of
lush millenial ease
remember awake
aware
when that's all
you were
a First One
the sole galaxy
of concentration
settling into revelation
that would not end
when ghosts were older
and stars were dark and
awkward children
dancing with their doubles
in atomic moonlight
remember
First One
remember
tossing unborn worlds
into dutiful
bestial oblivion
how it called to you
from afar
from within
remember how you
stood on nothing
and watched your dark
home turn to water
your head was the sky
yellow then
stalking a wild clarity
that would become
rocks
and dust
and wistful
asymmetry
longing for storms of
the potent birth
remember how they sang of
agony's simmering lights
how you would become
First Blood on
wisdom's tender lips
sacrificed
to yourself
for yourself
before yourself
remember
First One
remember
the smooth fruit
slithering round
the curve of your
newborn eye
remember the walking dream
when it first
learned to walk
when speech magnetic
carried life from its
nowhere gnosis
and cried for this moment
this remembering
by fire
by shy solid nudity
glowing within the many
married births
of they who taste it
the First Ones
who remember nothing
and know
down below being
down below mud and love
that nothing
remembers them too
impressed upon it
like shadows in the void
tasting it
as it tastes us too

Tripping around dogs is weird.

what would I want? earth.

it tries to steal
your gaze
to make you look up
to the sky
for Christ
the alien
for symbols burning
holes in
the atmosphere
to make you forget
everything that
makes you feel small
and beautiful
but it too
will be swallowed by
hallowed chthonic
earth
it's already staggering
in the valleys
feeling fear
in bright flowing
chasms
it begins to feel small
and beautiful
so beautiful

damn devil's tower

there's a bear
a damn big bear
you know
with balls as
big as
antique globes
says I belong
in Siberia
the people there
have a new star
good for
praying they say
I just want
one more
night in Texas
to pound my head
red and flat
put it in
the oven
with the other
shriveled
heads
wash down the old
stars with
reindeer piss
and fall out of
some back
door cathedral
I know Jim
Morrison will
be there
laughing at me
with a big
idiot grin
and a tower will
rise from
the rock
and Jim
that ugly old bear
will scratch at
the sky
caught in a dream
where fools roar as
they drown
where hot evil
breath
becomes music
where the bones of
dreamers are crushed
and bound
with Siberian
stardust
carried away
some say
by an
eagle
mad for its own
myth

sheepchallenge

Meat, by Terry Bisson, 1990

Stolen from: http://www.terrybisson.com

wolftufts

Recently we visited Hamilton's Pool in Dripping Springs, Texas to each bury a bit of hair from a fallen friend however we saw fit. I buried my share under some rocks at the base of an old tree next to a cool stream. Here are the pictures I took:

http://www.flickr.com/photos/54504506@N06/sets/72157624972506959/

lucifer paper

the others are
turning brown
I see it
in a gentler
sort of light
come along little ones
I am also small
and it's fall
for the first
time

blues blues,

a poet doesn't
think in words
he thinks in poetry
just as a vulture dreams
only through the taste
of things
why, I'm sure
the best of them never
thought a day
in their lives

Blake wasn't
a philosopher except
when his woman bled
from her deeper
eye and
felt her true age

Shelley drank
the saltwater of
his mind
and then he drowned
they burned him on
the beach
and he was ash
dry dry ash
and he no longer drank
anything

Rumi never
drank
he had wine
and no cups
he drank it all
and drank
nothing

he didn't think
and these spinning
freaks
they didn't drink
drinking's for thinking
men or men pretending
to think
drinking can slow
down the word
so that it may
be captured

but this is not
poetry
this is thinking
even Bukowski knew that
when he looks you in
the eye
and tells you why
why it's you
asking why

Kerouac was tragedy
a thinking man
and that's why
he's dead
other people have died for
better reasons

now we can only
drink in Kerouac
become drunk on pope
and dharma
and forlorn rags round
holy mirrors
pity him
pity what's left of
jazz in roaming
belltowers
pity like rain is
the pity of a valley
pity that it's just
shadows
cleaving meat
from bone

he's the reason why
I sleep
and eat the pulp of
you
and piss on
butterflies
and piss off
butterflies
and do even more
ordinary things
voluptuous
and plain

I don't write about
being human
much less try to
be one
I only get high and
so very
young
and plain
too plain to choose
to pour
to name revolutions that
arise
in dirty bathrooms
that humid hell
with no
mirrors

but I know why
Kerouac
asked why
it's so big in
here
and you lose it
whatever you thought
you had
you lose the score as soon
as you make it
while the king of
dreams
marches down on you
on elephants
that burrow into mineral
mind

and pull turnips from
your soft
white belly and
string the night with swaying
paper lanterns laughing
with cruelty in
the breeze

you think about people
suffering
and you drink
because you are not
a bodhisattva
your heart is too damn
big not to beg
for something
you want to heal but
you're too busy thinking
about it
too busy caring to do
anything
about it

you're a beast
poor beast
mouth full of blood
rosary streaming
from your
rear

you write about
pretty things
and they come back
to haunt you
or something less
clear
something worse

every time you write about
someone they're dying
in your
arms
you want to be a serpent
somewhere
under a moon
somewhere
just feeling your way
about it

but people want to believe
something
and they hurt each
other with
thought-desire
they crawl indignant from the
lion's mouth and beat
the everypagan
with the weight of
beauty
they bludgeon themselves
with it
just to hurt
others

Nietzsche himself could
have whipped
the horse's eyes
and who
would have cared?
we're all starving
artists
too mad for love and
standing in
its way
too brave to kiss
fear
atomic
old
fear

too wise to not think
about it
to drink with it
it's us
you know
we are the ones
we're waiting for
but we waited so long we
forget
we say we don't want to think
about it
and we think
about it

and we don't
stop
thinking
drinking
making children
dying in their arms
like it was always
supposed to
be

you could always whip
the poet's eyes
and have a
drink
on me

kinGship

cold winds come
you know that
I know that
a soft white magick
presses its
skin against the
night
all I know
is how to drive
deeper
deeper into it
a hammer
a silent nail
a mercy
unto itself
there is no
concern
only stinging flesh
and a kinship
I almost
forgot

tootootoot

the only kind of
death I ever understood
in a primal blues hound sort of way
in a musky psychedelic grace sort of way
is a blameless eternal hunger
pressing into the backs
of the youth
gently
as they face the fires that
hold up the only moon
beyond the cat's quiet night
a bearded wisdom of cold empty space
a house held in the chest
as ash mixes with dirt

these children who animate
themselves with bright black feathers
they see themselves as werewolves
not the phosphorescent machines
their parents saw
glowing behind dreaming tubes
all hung up on bones
no
the thought presses into their backs
gently

glassfish

get high
and read things you don't agree with
after all
the pope has been dethroned
and you are simply blessed
to be

fountains of wang

you are a fountain
feeding yourself the depth of movement
sustained by a glittering hologram
born into the rawness of giving
i am tossing into you both sides of my coin
for wishes easily fulfilled
don't try so hard
you're already flowing into me
and I am everyone

tenderending

do i dream the earth's dreams
half-dissolved innocent in silk
a vortex of unconscious song
do i travel a many splendored humiliation
between she and her reverent satellites
tasting of the silver vibrating essence of
fools who dwell upon her dark crescent
to build churches for them
to dance with elements of non-being
is it i who yelps longingly with coyotes
for bloods of the new bardo
or am i an android dreaming of electric sheep
on the dark side of the earth
you never see

is it told by stars that light will sweat
and make a language of textures slipped
filtered through the singing trees
shared among bodhisattvas and chupacabras
banging away eternal youth on warped space
meeting allies in caves and
dancing like awkward foreign worms
never straying from our common abyss
am i not that
pierced by a familiar light
subdued by electric natives with
a wooded breath reaching back
with or without earth
on the dark side of the word
you never see

Transparents

Nievo

The Fool Abides

Tales from the kitchen of Thailand’s most gruesome baker

Artist Kittiwat Unarrom bakes bread in the shape of bloody body parts to portray his religious beliefs, and they taste really good too.

Article here: http://www.cnngo.com/bangkok/play/tales-kitchen-thailands-goriest-baker-510619

Death and food are, after all, intimately related.

STEPHEN FRY: WHAT I WISH I'D KNOWN WHEN I WAS 18

What I wish I might come to know more deeply now.

http://vimeo.com/11414505

Mirror Neurons

From Adbusters:

Fourteen years ago neuroscientists introduced the world to a captivating new idea about the way our brains might work: they discovered the existence of specialized brain cells in the brains of macaque monkeys that are activated both when a monkey performs an intentional action (e.g. grabbing a banana) and when it sees another monkey performing that same action. They called these special brain cells mirror neurons since the monkeys mirrored in their own minds the actions of their neighbors. Scientists learned that at the brain level, monkey see was not so different from monkey do.

Even before researchers confirmed the existence of similar mirror neurons in human brains, which they did in 2007, the idea had worked its way into the zeitgeist and become a potent new way of seeing ourselves in relationship with each other. People have begun to wonder if mirror neurons could be responsible for language, culture, empathy and even morality. Where Darwinian survival of the fittest has heretofore imagined us as the strong pitted against the weak in a fatal struggle for food and sex, the mirror neuron suggests the importance of social strengths: that we are hardwired for empathy, that we are naturally interested not only in our own needs but also in the interests of others. As noted philosopher A.C. Grayling has said: “The essential point is that mirror neurons underwrite the ability to recognize what helps or distresses others, what they suffer and enjoy, what they need and what harms them.”

—Andrew Tuplin

This is yet another example of science showing us that we are social creatures, that selfishness does not make one "fitter" or more likely to survive. In primates, alphas who hoard all of the resources are set upon by the rest of the group. I saw an article recently saying that the most successful CEO's are those who are humble and not flashy. Or as the Tao sez, lead from behind.

Would it be safe to say that intelligence is largely a matter of understanding the interconnectedness of all things and being able to act as part of the whole?

Bhang Your Head!

They're getting that old time religion in northern India, as the annual Holi festival, an extravagant Hindu spring celebration of colors, is observed with potent marijuana milk shakes.

 Full article here: http://www.tokeofthetown.com/2010/03/bhang_bhang_your_head_hindu_holi_festival_celebrat.php

I can has peace of mind?

Breathe gently. Look within. Let what is both empty and full devour you like a human hot dog.

Fuck Pavement (Not the Band)

No More Pavement! The Problem of Impervious Surfaces

 Recent research, according to the New York Times, indicates that urban areas are about to get hotter – much hotter. Not exactly what blistering New Yorkers want to hear after one of the more brutal, record-breaking heat waves in memory.

Article here: http://blogs.ei.columbia.edu/water/2010/07/13/no-more-pavement-the-problem-of-impervious-surfaces/

Quantum entanglement holds together life's blueprint

THE most celebrated molecule in biology - the DNA double helix - might owe its shape to a mysterious quantum property called entanglement.

 Article here: http://www.newscientist.com/article/mg20727694.100-quantum-entanglement-holds-together-lifes-blueprint.html

I saw what you were doing.

Tongal

a sad clown riseth

i woke early
to dress as a mountain
with Parsifal's grinning vaporous
skull as my cap
walking only in valleys
my stillness dancing on magician's
purple shadows breathing
puffing chaos pipes with
flower maidens behind rocks shaped
like kings of another world
a world vivid as dirt

oh what a feast of fools
unconscious and magnetic
chewing to a brilliant pulp
those who forgot how to
love their own death
to laugh and riverrun
toward the snuff of holy discord
sun and moon sinking into travel
staining void with clarity
breathing in a man
in circles that protect
dragonflies in a rippling
textured magick whole

i wake early
before bristling housecats lose
interest in their
own gnostic poetry
i wake to power in
lakes' sunken depths
where life and death are one
dressing for the day
affixing wings of earth
a skull of clay

Carl Jung's Life/Death Parabola

Carl Jung:

"Life is an energy process. Like every energy-process, it is in principle irreversible and is therefore directed towards a goal. That goal is a state of rest. [...] The end of every process is its goal.

"With the attainment of maturity and at the zenith of biological existence, life's drive towards a goal in no wise halts. With the same intensity and irresistibility with which it strove upward before middle age, life now descends; for the goal no longer lies on the summit, but in the valley where the ascent began. The curve of life is like the parabola of a projectile which, disturbed from its initial state of rest, rises and then returns to a state of repose.

"The psychological curve of life, however, refuses to conform to this law of nature. Sometimes the lack of accord begins early in the ascent. The projectile ascends biologically, but psychologically it lags behind. [...] Our psychology then loses its natural basis. Consciousness stays up in the air, while the curve of the parabola sinks downward with ever-increasing speed.

"Natural life is the nourishing soil of the soul. Anyone who fails to go along with life remains suspended, stiff and rigid in midair. [...] From the middle of life onward, only he remains vitally alive who is ready to die with life. For in the secret hour of life's midday the parabola is reversed, death is born. The second half of life does not signify ascent, unfolding, increase, exuberance, but death, since the end is its goal. The negation of life's fulfilment is synonymous with the refusal to accept its ending. Both mean not wanting to live, and not wanting to live is identical with not wanting to die. Waxing and waning make one curve.

[...]

"Like a projectile flying to its goal, life ends in death. Even its ascent and its zenith are only steps and means to this goal."

Carl Jung, "The Soul and Death", pp. 405-408, from Volume 8 of the Collected Works of C.G. Jung: The Structure and Dynamics of the Psyche

bum yerself

to know such a taste
of sweetwine in summer lightness
summer beings broken up into
hunks of wet fungus on the earth
ass-drunk on wilderness
floating over jungles in silver discs
touching the world as you touch yourself
lightly
ever so lightly
to know such a giddy arc
a happy ghost rescued from a dark west
we enter this sacred hut
rattling tin heads
along the way

andagain

rainagain
shuddering green gay folds ecstatic
washes me deeply
walking in neon filth
is good for legs you don't see

Flights diverted, delayed as UFO detected hovering

An unidentified flying object (UFO) disrupted air traffic over Zhejiang's provincial capital Hangzhou late on Wednesday, the municipal government said on Thursday.

Article here: http://english.peopledaily.com.cn/90001/90782/90872/7058628.html

Looks like a flaming fire truck to me.

Wikiquotes: Timothy Leary

•  We always have urged people: Don't take LSD unless you are very well prepared, unless you are specifically prepared to go out of your mind. Don't take it unless you have someone that's very experienced with you to guide you through it. And don't take it unless you are ready to have your perspective on yourself and your life radically changed, because you're gonna be a different person, and you should be ready to face this possibility.
  • Documentary CBC: "How To Go Out of Your Mind: The LSD Crisis" (1966)

• People use the word "natural" ... What is natural to me is these botanical species which interact directly with the nervous system. What I consider artificial is 4 years at Harvard, and the Bible, and Saint Patrick's cathedral, and the sunday school teachings.
  • LSD: Methods of Control (1966)

• Art's certainly made a lot of money, and got on a lot of shows — he got himself into the Nixon White House riding on the death of his daughter. And I think that's ghoulish! That's ghoulish.
  • In a Stanley Siegel interview (c. 1977), with phone commentary by Art Linkletter who blamed his daughter's death on her involvement with LSD.

• I declare that The Beatles are mutants. Prototypes of evolutionary agents sent by God, endowed with a mysterious power to create a new human species, a young race of laughing freemen.
  • As quoted in Shout! (1981) by Philip Norman, p. 365; and in An Encyclopedia of Quotations about Music (1981) by Nat Shapiro, p. 303

• If you want to change the way people respond to you, change the way you respond to people.
  • Changing My Mind, Among Others (1982)

• "Turn on" meant go within to activate your neural and genetic equipment. Become sensitive to the many and various levels of consciousness and the specific triggers that engage them. Drugs were one way to accomplish this end. "Tune in" meant interact harmoniously with the world around you — externalize, materialize, express your new internal perspectives. Drop out suggested an elective, selective, graceful process of detachment from involuntary or unconscious commitments. "Drop Out" meant self-reliance, a discovery of one's singularity, a commitment to mobility, choice, and change. Unhappily my explanations of this sequence of personal development were often misinterpreted to mean "Get stoned and abandon all constructive activity."
  • Flashbacks (1983)

• Women who seek to be equal with men lack ambition.
  • As quoted in Third and Possibly the Best 637 Best Things Anybody Ever Said (1987) by Robert Byrne, #40

• We are dealing with the best-educated generation in history. They are a hundred times better educated than their grandparents, and ten times more sophisticated. There has never been such an open-minded group. The problem is that no one is giving them anything fresh. They've got a brain dressed up with nowhere to go.
  • Interview by David Sheff in Rolling Stone Twentieth Anniversary Issue (1987)

• Think for yourself and question authority.
  • Timothy Leary's track on Sound Bites from the Counter Culture (1989)

• That’s the left wing of the CIA debating the right wing of the CIA.
  • Discussing CNN’s Crossfire as quoted in Rolling Stone (14 December 1989)

• I have always considered myself, when I learned what the word meant, I've always considered myself a Pagan.
  • At the Neo-Pagan Starwood Festival (July 1991), recorded on Timothy Leary Live at Starwood (2001) by the Association for Consciousness Exploration ISBN 1-59157-002-6

• The universe is an intelligence test.
  • As quoted in Cosmic Trigger : Final Secret of the Illuminati (1993) by Robert Anton Wilson, p. 170

Our species has faced the frightening, terrorizing fact that we do not know who we are, or where we are going in this ocean of chaos...

• Throughout human history, as our species has faced the frightening, terrorizing fact that we do not know who we are, or where we are going in this ocean of chaos, it has been the authorities — the political, the religious, the educational authorities — who attempted to comfort us by giving us order, rules, regulations, informing — forming in our minds — their view of reality. To think for yourself you must question authority and learn how to put yourself in a state of vulnerable open-mindedness, chaotic, confused vulnerability to inform yourself.
  • How to Operate Your Brain (1994), a guided meditation spoken by Timothy Leary and set to music.

• I am 100 percent in favor of the intelligent use of drugs, and 1,000 percent against the thoughtless use of them, whether caffeine or LSD. And drugs are not central to my life.
  • Chaos and Cyber Culture (1994)

The drug does not produce the transcendent experience. It merely acts as a chemical key — it opens the mind, frees the nervous system of its ordinary patterns and structures.

• A psychedelic experience is a journey to new realms of consciousness. The scope and content of the experience is limitless, but its characteristic features are the transcendence of verbal concepts, of space-time dimensions, and of the ego or identity. Such experiences of enlarged consciousness can occur in a variety of ways: sensory deprivation, yoga exercises, disciplined meditation, religious or aesthetic ecstasies, or spontaneously. Most recently they have become available to anyone through the ingestion of psychedelic drugs such as LSD, psilocybin, mescaline, DMT, etc. Of course, the drug does not produce the transcendent experience. It merely acts as a chemical key — it opens the mind, frees the nervous system of its ordinary patterns and structures.
  • The Psychedelic Experience (1995)

• Monotheism is the primitive religion which centers human consciousness on Hive Authority. There is One God and His Name is _______ (substitute Hive-Label). If there is only One God then there is no choice, no option, no selection of reality. There is only Submission or Heresy. The word Islam means "submission". The basic posture of Christianity is kneeling. Thy will be done.
  • The Intelligence Agents (1996)

You're only as young as the last time you changed your mind.

• Each religion has got their own way of making you feel like a victim. The Christians say "you are a sinner", and you better just zip up your trousers and give the money to the pope and we'll give you a room up in the hotel in the sky.
  • Timothy Leary's Last Trip (1997)

• We saw ourselves as anthropologists from the twenty-first century inhabiting a time module set somewhere in the dark ages of the 1960s. On this space colony we were attempting to create a new paganism and a new dedication to life as art.
  • On the Castalia Institute in Millbrook, New York; quoted in Storming Heaven : LSD and the American Dream (1998) by Jay Stevens, p. 208

• You're only as young as the last time you changed your mind.
  • As quoted in Office Yoga : Simple Stretches for Busy People (2000) by Darrin Zeer, p. 52

• In the information age, you don't teach philosophy as they did after feudalism. You perform it. If Aristotle were alive today he'd have a talk show.
  • As quoted in The Best Advice Ever for Teachers (2001) by Charles McGuire and Diana Abitz, p. 57

• Why not?
  • Said repeatedly, with various inflections, these were among his last words before his death (31 May 1996), as quoted in "Timothy Leary's Last Moments" by Carol Rosin. Some have stated his final intelligible word was "Beautiful".

• At one point consciousness-altering devices like the microscope and telescope were criminalized for exactly the same reasons that psychedelic plants were banned in later years. They allow us to peer into bits and zones of Chaos.
  • As quoted in Pronoia Is the Antidote for Paranoia : How the Whole World Is Conspiring to Shower You with Blessings (2005), by Rob Brezsny, p. 8

• Civilization is unbearable, but it is less unbearable at the top.
  • As quoted in Still Casting Shadows : A Shared Mosaic of U.S. History (2006) by B. Clay Shannon, p. 376

• I've left specific instructions that I do not want to be brought back during a Republican administration.
  • On being brought back to life, during the period in which he considered putting his body into cyronic suspension, as quoted in The Nastiest Things Ever Said About Republicans (2006) by Martin Higgins, p. 130

• Seven million people I turned on, and only one hundred thousand have come by to thank me.
  • Don Lattin, The Harvard Psychedelic Club (2010), p. 202

The Shining Abyss of a Language

WHEN Walter Spies arrived in Bali, he found a culture completely devoted to art, yet to which the notion of art for art's sake was alien. The Balinese have no word for "artist"; painting, carving stone and wood, weaving, playing a musical instrument, and, above all, dancing were just what one did when not fishing or working in the rice fields.

Happeh Fnord of Jubilee

The DEA Took My Future Drugs Away

In the cyberpunk comic book Transmetropolitan it is many years in the future and the DEA is forbidden from banning drugs that don't yet exist, but new substances are being created and distributed constantly by machines called Makers that intelligently reorganize matter. Though it takes the DEA only 20 minutes to ban a drug after its creation, there are always new drugs on the market. Anything that is more than a few hours old is considered archaic and inferior.

Though this comic was written in the 90s, it does seem to have predicted our current drug trends. I just hope that the DEA never has the ability to outlaw non-existent chemicals based on molecular association. Perhaps the worst thing would be for them make it illegal to merely develop a compound based on its similarity in chemical structure to something that was already needlessly banned. At that point, the mere intention to bring various arrangements of atoms into being becomes a thought crime and they have far, far too much power.

Now that we've fully committed the crime of outlawing nature as we know it, the next step is to outlaw all these alien forms of gnosis before they even have a name. Not only are we at war with known elements of the world that bring us to terms with the unknown, we are now at war with the unknown itself. This is a logical, albeit twisted and very unfortunate, progression for those in power of collective fear. Because anything in the realm of the unmanifest can be a catalyst for the kind of social upheaval that could usurp those in power, they are trying to build their walls closer and closer to the source of all possibility, to isolate and eventually eradicate chaos.

When will we learn that the goddess can not be chained? Our laws are merely creating a ritual, and not a particularly enjoyable one at that, by which we sacrifice ourselves to chaos.

Steady State Economy

"...a stationary condition of capital and population implies no stationary state of human improvement. There would be as much scope as ever for all kinds of mental culture, and moral and social progress; as much room for improving the art of living, and much more likelihood of it being improved, when minds ceased to be engrossed by the art of getting on."

-John Stuart Mill

Wiki: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Steady_state_economy

Michel Houellebecq vs. William Burroughs (Quotes)

From: http://thoughtcatalog.com/2010/william-burroughs-michel-houellebecq-quotes/

Michel Houellebecq — the misanthropic, caninophilic French novelist — and William Burroughs both deploy thorough visions of the world. They proffer more or less elaborate cosmologies, ethics, and particularly critical assessments of humanity. And both view the act of writing in general, and their own writing in particular, as an active force doing some kind of battle, performing some kind of negotiation, with the powers of stupidity, evil, greed, and banality. Both understand the human universe as being at the mercy of non-human laws — for Houellebecq, it’s all species, biology, physics; for Burroughs, it’s biology, physics, magic.
But whereas Houellebecq sees a world of absolute bleakness, Burroughs sees a world of plenitude — filled with shit and bile and semen and stupidity and cruelty but full nonetheless. If Houellebecq offers a world heading to zero, Burroughs offers a world of infinite complexity.

On Society

Houellebecq
I don’t like this world. I definitely do not like it. The society in which I live disgusts me; advertising sickens me; computers make me puke.
Burroughs
America is not so much a nightmare as a non-dream. The American non-dream is precisely a move to wipe the dream out of existence. The dream is a spontaneous happening and therefore dangerous to a control system set up by the non-dreamers.

The Future of Humanity

Houellebecq
Few beings have ever been so impregnated, pierced to the core, by the conviction of the absolute futility of human aspiration. The universe is nothing but a furtive arrangement of elementary particles. A figure in transition toward chaos. That is what will finally prevail. The human race will disappear. Other races in turn will appear and disappear. And human actions are as free and as stripped of meaning as the unfettered movements of the elementary particles. Good, evil, morality, sentiments? Pure ‘Victorian fictions.’ All that exists is egotism. Cold, intact, and radiant.
Burroughs
Man is an artifact designed for space travel. He is not designed to remain in his present biologic state any more than a tadpole is designed to remain a tadpole.

Youth and Dreams

Houellebecq
Adolescence is not only an important period in life, but that it is the only period where one may speak of life in the full sense of the word.
Burroughs
As a young child I wanted to be a writer because writers were rich and famous. They lounged around Singapore and Rangoon smoking opium in a yellow pongee silk suit. They sniffed cocaine in Mayfair and they penetrated forbidden swamps with a faithful native boy and lived in the native quarter of Tangier smoking hashish and languidly caressing a pet gazelle.

Influence

Houellebecq
I’ve lived so little that I tend to imagine I’m not going to die; it seems improbable that human existence can be reduced to so little; one imagines, in spite of oneself, that sooner or later something is bound to happen. A big mistake. A life can just as well be both empty and short. The days slip by indifferently, leaving neither trace nor memory; and then all of a sudden they stop.
Burroughs
I am not one of those weak-spirited, sappy Americans who want to be liked by all the people around them. I don’t care if people hate my guts; I assume most of them do. The important question is whether they are in a position to do anything about it. My affections, being concentrated over a few people, are not spread all over Hell in a vile attempt to placate sulky, worthless shits.

Sex

Houellebecq
In a perfectly liberal sexual system, some people have an exciting erotic life; others are reduced to masturbation and solitude.
Burroughs
There is nothing more provocative than minding your own business.

Love

Houellebecq
Love binds, and it binds forever. Good binds while evil unravels. Separation is another word for evil; it is also another word for deceit.
Burroughs
Love? What is it? Most natural painkiller. What there is. LOVE.

Shaman or Shy Man?

Unseen Chaos

Unseen Chaos (po-te-kitea)
Unpossessed, Unpassing
Chaos of utter darkness
Untouched & untouchable
--Maori Chant

Osho: Strange Consequences

Do Glass Pipes, Incense Prove Teens Are Practicing Shamanism?

Ed Sanders - The Iliad

The Iliad --Ed Sanders

(Sing Goddess, of the anger of Peleus’ son Achilles,
Baleful wrath that brought countless woes upon the Achaeans! …Buddy!)

Get tough, get tall, get slob, get drunk, get smart, get hip, get hep, get pissed,
Johnny, Johnny, Johnny Pissoff

Oh Johnny, Johnny, Johnny, Johnny,
Why did you beat up that queer?
Johnny, Johnny, Johnny, Johnny,
Why did you beat up that que-ee-ee-er?

Well, I went into the trance I usually fall into
When I watch the Budweiser clock spin
Around for about two hours
I was drinking Dickel Brothers Sour Mash, buddy

When all of a sudden my brain became sullied
By images of vampires, so
I thought I’d better get in my old Corvette and
Wheel around the county court house a few times

To clear my mind; then I thought I’d go over to
May’s café for some coffee and lemon pie
Well, I peeled down the straza; all of a sudden
I scarfed an eyeload on a queer

I mean I think he looked like a queer, God I hate
Queers, I hate ’em, hate ’em; he had on
Penny loafers and, uh, purple bell bottoms; and he had
A huge protest button on that said, “God is Acid”

Boy, that pee-ee-issed me off! Anyway, so
I screeched to a halt and I yelled out the window and
I said, “Hey, faggot! What you doin’ in my town, buddy?”
That son of a bitch was ignoring my existence

Boy I hate that, so I leaped out of my old Corvette, and
I trotted over and I proceeded to kick ass on the
Goddamn son-of-a-bitching morphodite; I walked
On his face and, shee-it, it was more fun that squashing tadpoles

Then I went on over to May’s café for some coffee,
Coffee coffee coffee coffee coffee coffee coffee coffee…

Get tough, get tall, get slob, get drunk, get smart, get hip, get hep, get pissed,
Johnny, Johnny, Johnny Phphphphphissoff

Ladies and Gentlemen, the Johnny Pissoff credo:
I, Jonathan Abner Tobias Pissoff,
In the presence of the Universal God of Salvation,
Do solemnly affirm that I have been chosen to
Beat up queers!
I further affirm, that although I’m a decent
God-fearing man with family and property
I, uh, I want to kill, rape, ravish, plunder, pillage,
Stomp, devour, destroy, hack, smash, slash and bash!
All queers, commies, sheenies, hallies and hunkies,
All greaseballs, honkies, Polacs, lepers and beaners,
All bohunks, eggheads, fudgesicles and high-slants,
All poets, pigs, frogs, queers, peace-creeps, Cajuns,
Dwarfs, dips***s and teenage loose women!
In the name of Jesus Christ, this I do affirm!

Oh Johnny, Johnny, Johnny, Johnny,
Why did you beat up that queer (he didn’t cry or nothin’!)?
Oh Johnny, Johnny, Johnny, Johnny,
Why did you beat up that queer (nobody saw me do it!)?
Why did you beat up that queer?
(Well he was walking up to the Legion Hall where the boy scouts meet, I didn't want to see that)
Why did you beat up that queer, Johnny?
(Well, I mean, he had, he had smooth hands; I mean
He looked, he tried to wink at me, I don’t know, uh!)

Why did you beat up that qu-ee-ee-eer?

Chirpadoo-doo

the feathered, enthusiastic
young juggler of truths
makes fools of gods
makes food of them too
she sings chirpadee-dee
chirpadee-dee

the lovelit holes
in cosmic backyards
grow into wells of being
they sing chirpadee-dee
chirpadee-dee

Be(h)old

behold
a man without conspiracy
without the foresight
of masked dancers
and stoned ancestors
a child held in the graces
of serene meaningless embers
huddled fast in bare gardens
kissed deep within by desert winds
searing presence into but few words
into spears of bamboo
which follows the night
which hollows the song

behold
a wisdom taken to the earth
struck down by the rooty
warm teas of a black sun
fearless in agave beds
sweaty and covered in fireflys
a savage love set upon itself
a nighttime pour of sweet animal void
graybearded like the river rushing within
scrolls soiled torn and budding
singing of a simple nudity
rising as a cool mass of song
a song and nothing more
a song for you
the beholder

Six Ways Mushrooms Can Save the World

6 ways mushrooms can save the world: Paul Stamets on TED.com

Love & Theft

Elvis Presley - Edge of Reality

Elvis had an obligatory LSD song?

El Es Divine

Pukenjolly's Yoga Sutra

"You have to learn to taste your own vomit, and then delight in it." 

 -The Venerable Robina Courtin on the Buddhist path to enlightenment.

Deepak Ram - A Night in Lenasia

Good Times With a Bad Trip

"Shiva's involvement with Tantra and Kali's dark nature have led to her becoming an important Tantric figure. To the Tantric initiates, it was essential to face Kali's Curse, the terror of death, as willingly as they accepted Blessings from her beautiful, nurturing, maternal aspect. For them, wisdom meant learning that no coin has only one side: as death cannot exist without life, so life cannot exist without death."

2CB or not 2CB

Yin Yolk

Srsly, d00ds.

What's so funny 'bout peace, love, and understanding?

It will be okay.

Eschatons O' Fun

Indian Summer

Wolfing

pigfeather

Latter Daytripper Saint

Death and Texas

smellcraft

this is for
green ghosts with
modest koans of movement
breath changing shape
eclipsing a future moon
thick moans on edges vast
neon gods in heavy smoke
sweet hollow scents of roots
disappearing into blackwater void
masks of blessing and flame
tickling soft round bellies
of infinite shuddering hills
as freeform tribes
on helpless lovedrunk mules
circle their own stellar
brightly feathered charm

this is for the way
you said my name
and i fell into that teacup
natural ways of
being so many shadows
beneath so many leaves
spilling over desperate
modern spells
giggling in fountains in
woods around pyramids
leaving it all behind
because i'm not going anywhere
not without a new language
not without being stoned
in some new way
an eagle
disappearing

Ducktails - Landrunner

ancestral color

i set up a hammock
someone else's hammock
didn't build the damn thing
over a fire
at the edge of spring
ancestors burning in purple oil
didn't want to say anything
just drop my seeds
and swing
swing
warm my ass molten
thread my long hair into songs
grow old with the net
woven by those who titter
in the forest i painted
in black and white
and gold
bright gold
they caught me
easy
one day i will be an ancestor
gonna make me a hammock
sit at my bench
grind primitive tension
to dust i don't know

Lucidity ov Ebert

Roger Ebert refuses further surgery if his cancer comes back. He has this to say in his journal:

I know it is coming, and I do not fear it, because I believe there is nothing on the other side of death to fear. I hope to be spared as much pain as possible on the approach path. I was perfectly content before I was born, and I think of death as the same state. What I am grateful for is the gift of intelligence, and for life, love, wonder, and laughter. You can't say it wasn't interesting. My lifetime's memories are what I have brought home from the trip. I will require them for eternity no more than that little souvenir of the Eiffel Tower I brought home from Paris.

now a weaver of patience

moon nectar
slows me to a gentle song
stirring the pinestraw in my bath
a cool water constellation
rippling triumphantly at dawn
yes at dawn the hunter eats moss
and dims himself
dims the snake's breath
dancing on mountains behind the sun
now the foundlings of magick
with stone-tipped beaks
and lunches still warm in sacks
ripen along the reaching path
their bushy wisps and
fragrant trolling
chant in the rhythm
of pine pine pine
at dawn I am sleeping
hunting slow and clean
I am finding earth
emerging from its own wilderness
my foot slips
and I am comforted by falling
arrows of precious heat
scattering across time

No Matter, Never Mind

by Gary Snyder

The Father is the Void
The Wife    Waves

Their child is Matter.

Matter makes it with his mother
And their child is Life,
          a daughter.

The Daughter is the Great Mother
Who, with her father/brother Matter
       as her lover,

Gives birth to the Mind.

God is Dead

Pontypool

Pontypool...
Pontypool...
Pontypool...

Just kidding.

How can a film recapitulate so viciously every desire I ever had for a spontaneous language driven by pure novelty? Does anyone get it? Do I? I hope so. I dope so. I rope slow. I pope slow.

It seems like a very, very large chunk of human communication could be mindless repetition. Rush Limbaugh, or insert any other proud moth-filled mouth here, drops a phrase, the appropriate aural mirrors reflect it in an endless circle, and everyone in the middle of that ideological boundary just repeats a few words without any explanation behind it. Lately I see "socialism" as the buzz. Obama is a Socialist! Obama is a Socialist! Osama is a SoCal Fish!

But what does that mean? Try to explain it without depending on synonymous replacement chants, please. How would you like it if all dictionaries were thesauruses? How would you stay connected to the original spark of innovation? By infusing the words with emotional fury, the only thing that breaks through the numbness of mechanical action, of course!

People mistrust any politician who explains things in logical terms, for he becomes an intellectual elitist, while preferring those who explain nothing and seek to spread blind passion. But fuck, that's just something I read on the internet.

Screaming saves the dying word, right? But a tolerance builds and it becomes harder and harder to pretend that a direct experience of meaning is contained within the words, so you scream louder and louder, and eventually you're in a rage and the savageness of desperation is the only thing that exists, having outlived any conscious acknowledgment of a word's dynamic implications.

At that point, you're a zombie, or the word is a zombie, and you are reduced to a singular desire, to consume and spread, to be replicated through destruction and thus justified in all of your rage. You are now the religious zealot of a meme, who can only find validation in knowing that someone else can be infected with the same strain of virus. Good job, parrot. Your blog is a hit now!

Burroughs and Joyce suddenly stand before us like Buddha and Christ. Every poet who ever swung around the alleys of the mind with a jazz-like unsteadiness seems to have actualized a natural philosophy which aims to avoid the ever-increasing tangles of our mental wire. Association increases in complexity within even loosely defined borders and the only thing that brings a sense of clarity sometimes is a burning sword slicing through established relationships in language.

But how do you talk of this, as you surely want to do, without committing the crime yourself? Do you become the holy man in the temple who expresses himself necessarily through a chalkboard? Do you keep speaking but allow a fever dream to drive the content of your speech as you invent an entirely new universe?

The trick might be outside of language entirely. It might not be relevant how, or if, you speak at all. Because expression follows perception, perception must be the source. Shock the system, shock the monkey, sledgehammer tongues falling to the ground. See. You are a fucking infant. You are in it to zen it.

Lather, rinse, repeat. Lather with the quantum foam, where the buffalo roam. Can you hear me now? Beneath anything mechanical in our world, no matter how much strength it gains, no matter how much its agents seem to bear good tidings, there is the upset conveyed by spirit, or chaos, Hermes, Thoth, Trickster, Bugs Bunny, Eris, that clump of dirt, that star, that scratch on your cornea, your farting god. It's time to be paranoid. If you inspire paranoia, you better also feel it yourself.

"The soft overcomes the hadron collider." -Tao Teh Kinky

Things are moving in all directions. Try to contain it and an energy becomes more volatile and you feel more and more like a schmuck even though you're getting better and better at pretending that you're not. Maybe it doesn't matter what we say. Maybe verbal communication is a form of social grooming. I read that on the internet once!

It's not like we're actual zombies, that words become murderous at every level of stale interaction, right? I don't expect the spirit of liberation to ever have any continuing cult - that devotion belongs to the word. But a mad laugh blasts at what is innately disruptive and it won't feel any need to justify itself. There is no need for redemption when your goal is to exhaust every possibility of this existential singularity. So I am saying nothing, I hope. With any luck, these words will fall on deaf ears.

If you put the sound of one hand clapping on a loudspeaker, you hope that people don't start humming the tune. They'll pin you down in your isolated booth where you broadcast everything you found relevant from the wire, they'll dig for your voice so they can also surf out of the void on radio waves, and they'll eat you, eat away all illusion until you realize that you are one of them, as you always have been.

Now... the upset.

I really had you going, didn't I?

This was all a joke. A yolk. A soak.

The thing is, viral interpretations of memetics would frequently hope for expression as an alienated harmony of disparate cells. Conversely, there's flowing resonance, ripples in continuity to which we are all subject. We wouldn't call a wave in water a consequential villian spawned by the evil ocean, would we? It's okay to be a zombie, folks. Here, have my brains and I'll have some of yours. Lather, rinse, repeat.

All we ever wanted is to let the energy flow through us, to animate us in its passing. I couldn't blame anyone for that. We are all fools stepping off of that cliff and that requires no justification. Purpose would be contrived, and so it shall be. Contrive, motherfucker, contrive and thrive. You're alive.

History repeats itself to the extent that you recognize cycles. If the reference points seem a bit arbitrary and begin to dissolve, then it is not repetition so much as awareness reaching out for anything, which, amusingly, occurs at the beginning of a cycle. Truth may be best expressed in any old instance of paradox. Shock the system. I read that in the sky once. Why must you return? No, really, ask yourself that.


Repeat it until the bomb drops.
The Bomb Drops.
The Bomb drops.
The bomb drops.
the bomb drops
bomb


FIN
{translated as: I hope this doesn't feel conclusive}

Tutencocaine and the Crackbaby Mummies

 

It's true. Cocaine and nicotine have been found in Egyptian and Sudanese mummies, dating from far before any *known* contact to the Americas, where coca and tobacco originate.

http://www.druglibrary.org/schaffer/Misc/mummies.htm

Atheists 'just as ethical as churchgoers'

Taken from: http://www.telegraph.co.uk/science/7189188/Atheists-just-as-ethical-as-churchgoers.html

Atheists are just as ethical and have as strong a moral compass as churchgoers, new research shows. 

 

Published: 7:30AM GMT 09 Feb 2010

People who have no religion know right from wrong just as well as regular worshippers, according to the study.

The team behind the research found that most religions were similar and had a moral code which helped to organise society.

But people who did not have a religious background still appeared to have intuitive judgments of right and wrong in common with believers, according to the findings, published in the journal Trends in Cognitive Sciences.

Dr Marc Hauser, from Harvard University, one of the co-authors of the research, said that he and his colleagues were interested in the roots of religion and morality.

"For some, there is no morality without religion, while others see religion as merely one way of expressing one's moral intuitions," he said.

The team looked at several psychological studies which were designed to test an individual’s morality.
Dr Hauser added: "The research suggests that intuitive judgments of right and wrong seem to operate independently of explicit religious commitments.

"However, although it appears as if co-operation is made possible by mental mechanisms that are not specific to religion, religion can play a role in facilitating and stabilising co-operation between groups."

He added that the findings could help to explain the complex relationship between morality and religion.
"It seems that in many cultures religious concepts and beliefs have become the standard way of conceptualising moral intuitions,” he said.

"Although, as we discuss in our paper, this link is not a necessary one, many people have become so accustomed to using it, that criticism targeted at religion is experienced as a fundamental threat to our moral existence."

Gnarls Archer

Baby Bizarre

Being weird is the most normal thing you can do.

The desire to determine normality is the desire to find an average with which to measure one's own uniqueness in a process of individuation. Though it can be used oppressively, at its heart this behavior is a means to feel out the self.

Weird, ain't it?

I'm setting the whole damn woods on fire.

"The bigger you build the bonfire, the more darkness is revealed."

-Terence McKenna

Documentary: Know Your Mushrooms

 

KNOW YOUR MUSHROOMS follows uber myco visionaries Gary Lincoff and Larry Evans (two of the more expert and unforgettably mercurial characters in the community) as they lead us on a hunt for the wild mushroom and the deeper cultural experiences attached to the mysterious fungi.

Combining material filmed at the Telluride Mushroom Fest with animation and archival footage along with a neo-psychedelic soundtrack by the Flaming Lips, KNOW YOUR MUSHROOMS opens the doors to perception, takes the audience on a longer, stranger trip and delivers them to a brave new world where the fungi might well guide humanity to a saner, safer place… with extra cheese…

CONSUMER WARNING: Don’t Go Into The Forest Without This Movie!

http://sphinxproductions.com/films/mushrooms/ 

If you know your mycology, this movie might not be the most informative piece of media for you, but I recommend it nonetheless because it is entertaining, sometimes even cute. It starts out quite normal, maybe to rope in the squares, and eventually gets very McKenna-esque. Though the movie is brief, they do try to cover every possibility in the relationship between humans and mushrooms. The characters are enigmatic old hippie wanderers in a sense and yet know their stuff very well. I learned from one of them that reishi mushrooms can be very effective in treating psoriasis.

One should be able to find a torrent of the DVD rip online, just as I did. You probably won't regret it.

May This Blog Find You Disturbed

"We must always be disturbed by the truth."

-Dogen, a thirteenth century Japanese Buddhist teacher

Mother's Elf

Just as one accepts the physical body as an immediate reality, so too should one accept the emotional body in its present manifestation. It is what we have to work with, our brightest means of discovery. And just as it is with the body, we should feel it fully and follow it with utter devotion as a puppy follows its master.

This isn't to say that we are mistaken in the desire to change our momentary modality, however, for to accept the emotional state in its connection to the great primacy is to accept also its transformative aspect as all things are light-hearted with the spirit of change. Alchemy has a very loving approach to what it seeks to transmute, I think. When a mother pushes her child to grow in the world, she does so out of love.

We can be mothers to ourselves. We can love ourselves unconditionally, no matter what forms appear as the emotional body, and we can always provide encouragement. The mother understands that everything happens in baby steps. She never faults her child for stumbling. She accepts her child in its awkward, innocent state, for that is its expression of beauty.

Jib Kidder - Windowdipper

The Universe is a T00b

 

Ah, Zen. 

*HACK HACK COUGH COUGH VOMIT BLOOD*

Whatever you got.

There Are No Misteaks

From Morgan's Tarot Deck.

 

The ancient Chinese said this to each other before business negotiations.

Whatever happens on the relative plane, the cosmos as a whole makes no errors. The uncreated, unborn and unmade always provide new alternatives. There is no possibility of ever straying from the path, whatever its turns may be.

This is not a license to do anything but an assertion that the ego or the illusion of ego tends to create problems.

Anal Beads... I Mean, Happiness

In trying to put the concept of happiness in the proper context, I'm avoiding philosophy, or worse yet, ethics. Energy in our squishy little world seems to go through a cycle. Part of this cycle, one might say, is happiness. Or perhaps happiness is the ability itself of the cycle to be completed rather than hung up on one part.

The latter might be more akin to happiness as the yogi's acceptance, where one accepts all that comes with equanimity. That state seems dismal at first, but if one sees it through it can flower into something much more redeeming, something that could be explained rather crudely as "happiness." Ah, well, crudeness is simple, so this is not without appeal. I am happy to exist, however that turns out.

Wilhelm Reich's version of the cycle (tension -> charge -> discharge -> relaxation) works for me. Just as there is no orgasm without an initial sexual tension in the muscles, happiness also must follow certain tensions. It will come and it will go, all the while providing us with an indigenous chemical reward system that guides us through the terrestrial matrix.

I've noticed this cycle occurring many times over in my life thus far, and not by chance so much as by an equal balance of points and counterpoints. You can't avoid either side of the coin. Even when I've tried to remain in a sad state, I've failed terribly. Or failed rather joyfully, you might say. The best we can do, as far as I can tell, is be an honest witness to change.

So, just breathe, I guess. Fuck, don't look at me. I don't know.

Multimedia, Schmultimedia

A Visual Album by Danny Perez and Animal Collective.

http://www.oddsac.com/ 

A Visual Album by Danny Perez and Animal Collective

Khalil Gibran, Giving Me a Soul Boner

"For in truth it is life that gives unto life- while you,
who deem yourself a giver, are but a witness."

-Khalil Gibran in The Prophet

Fuck Referring to Anything as "Untitled"

where tender words are felt harsh
a humble archer aligns the incomprehensible
with that which is even less understood
what will we become, fair darkness?
I in you and you in I
in strange orbit we do not belong to ourselves
in deep earth heaving into night
we will give all that is bare and sacred
all that flowers beyond itself from youth
we will give it to a love of fire
for it is the same force that makes a child
that also makes a man in the wilderness of dreams
a suffering of gentleness and light
received in the swaying days and nights of feathers
where tender birds are felt harsh by the tree
and awakening is seen with awkward, sore delight

is it a wise man who walks with our strange desire?
is it fair to admit a divine pattern formed
dwelling only in the flow of waters dark
to ever a broken poet without a word for home?
can we tell now why spellbound minstrels
with broken wet singing lips come to his nameless abode
where windows of every color lay shattered
where thieves in ancient moods come to pay respect
to his loving, thriving abyss?
can such a valley bristling with its lowliness
know of giving as its eternal mode?
of giving space itself to movement
of giving much empty thought to time?

I will be his witness in silent feeling
his grace heaped entirely upon my mule
pressing forward through veils undreamable
tearing at skins still screaming from birth
I will be the fragile whisper of those who came before
yet disappearing over mountains of themselves
I will be life fulfilled yet yearning
I will be a glittering sea of corpses sucked at
by weeds turning over heavens with mineral kindness
I in he and he in I
we shall further our knowledge in love
where tender words are felt harsh
and ever a humble archer is he
aligning his heart with the long sway of the stars
we shall ever be this flaming arrow
a broken, ageless thing without any word for itself
knowing ourselves as what is given freely
to darkness smiling within

Celyn

 

Artist Site: Celyn

The Search for Authenticity Begins Within

With recent events in Haiti, there is a tendency to see the collective behavior of its residents as a robust example of human nature. Here is one person's feeling on the matter:

It's during the worst trials and tribulations you see how human-beings REALLY are. That's when they reveal their REAL disgusting behavior. In times of good it's easy for everyone to be a good person. It's in times of hardship you find out the truth about humans.

I would like to address this sentiment.

First off, if my "real" self were present only during dire circumstances, I think I would prefer a shitty life because it would at least be true. Perhaps I would crave suffering for the sake of authenticity. Fortunately, I do not agree that the one who suffers most is any more real than the one in a comfortable lifestyle.

To play devil's subtle advocate, I do think the common truism to which I refer does have some merit, that its error lies only in it being poorly expressed. When people say that disaster brings out the real image of another, perhaps they wish to express the knowledge that a person can't be limited to present circumstance lest we dampen our ability to adapt to changes in others', or our own, behavior.

It is an awareness of the endless possibilities of behavior, recognizing that in the dynamic nature of personality, a shift in circumstance will result in a shift in behavior. Despite how the truism may sound when taken at face value, because it is indeed not the most semantically sound way of stating things, it does, however, also confirm that there is no fixed self. Or so it seems to me.

Also, there is a feeling directed within that detects a more basic self that exists beyond mere reactions. It is the source of creation rather than the reflection of the created, yet it is not the "doer" in consciousness at all. This, I think, can't be denied if you've actually experienced it.

This isn't to say that it actually is more authentic, or that it must be the singular method of self-definition, but various spiritual practices can make it apparent that it is entirely possible to enter the state of the observer, which can feel far more real than everyday tendencies to be fully engaged in a continuum of knee-jerk reactions.

Ultimately, however, this self is not separate and by its very nature it does include all other states as a mode of itself. It is always present, even if not the star of the show, so we are never any less or any more real than any other time.

But I want to acknowledge that sometimes we do feel more authentic, that sometimes we do feel as if we are going with or against the grain of what we intuit to be a healthy coexistence with our environment. The trick is to do what feels real without punishing yourself and alienating yourself from any manifestation of your being.

I enjoy meditating, through the observer, on all possible selves, including them all in the loving folds of self-identity. This means the good, the bad, and the fugly. I try to always show compassion, but I also know that I am capable of terrible things given the proper circumstance. And that would be real too. Like Sartre said, "existence precedes essence." Or as someone else said, "real is as real does."

Slug Sex, Make It Hurt

Skontog - VHShaman

Ohhhhhhhhhh yeaaaaahhhhhh, time to lay down some mo' funk. In today's struggling economy, how can you afford NOT to groove on the celestial howl?

Some more psychedelic mash-up stuff I've been doing:

http://phalaris.bluesphereweb.com/skontog/Skontog_-_VHShaman.rar

(This is the new link.)

I used only Cool Edit Pro 2 this time. Feels good. Call it an audiobiography of a schizophrenetic.

Hang On To Your Ego

Holy Mountain Low

Every Fool Thing

every hang-nail holy
every butt pimple holy
every wolf in the tea house
scratching at back door mind
scratching at black hole velvet intelligence within
every fool thing holy
every rainbow-hued ghost in blue moon trance
every black-nosed buddha of translucent breath
everything falling through cosmic gutters of night
behind pastoral screens beaming
droning freak enchantments
yep it's holy
every stoned reflection
every heart lulled
every sweet graceful shadow rhythm
everything in a ragged old universe holy
everything an open eye
everything harvesting zen from seeds of fire
every star banging bright tonight
holy holy holy
until the chao comes home
until the tao comes home
until ET phones home
until a monkey AUMs
like I said
it's all holy
every serpent string
in the ever-holy musick of the spheres
every clear mist of this fur-spotted body
every blossomed jewel on death's wilderness mask
every liquid invocation anchoring time
every beatific grind in blood and bone holy
every fool thing holy
because it is also wise
everyone I love you
because you are holy

.

there is a cat
lit up a cigarette
thought to himself
i'm not dead yet
there is a prayer
from which love returns
here i am now
a flower burned

Lost in the Sauce, Found in the Sound

i knew a man bojangles
he did the dance of creation for you
he smelled like hanuman
a vagabond beneath an arch of flames
mr. tambourine man
with his ever-changing rainbow
of weather-beaten mudras
brought the house down
like psychic children
we set fire to a straw hut
at the end of the universe
i find my way home

Shiva Shart Art

i was dripping muttering
doing pranayama naked
in a public shower
and i saw her there
a hare krishna in glitter jeans
"slut" was written on her shirt
a midday pagan heart
eclipsing the sun
luring young stars out to play
we humped under the table
at the feast of dreams
a senseless act
of ahimsa


she said she knew
why i was nude
a beggar
a butterfly
a chaos poet who
acts like he knows
while blue-skinned natives
writhe among the weird
i know you feed me visions
so i can stay awake
shedding snakeskin veils
of bewilderment
we humped under the table
at the feast of dreams
a senseless act
of ahimsa

Chakramon!

George Lucas a disciple of Crowley?

Author unknown.


Thelemic references in the Star Wars trilogy:

- Crowley was OHO of the Order of Oriental Templars (OTO) and Lucas'
original name for the Jedi Knights was the Jedi Templars.

- Crowley's secret name in the OTO was supposed to have been 'Phoenix'
and the symbol of the Rebel Alliance is a stylised phoenix.

- The windows in the Emperor's chambers at the climax of Return of the
Jedi spell 'OTO'.

- from the Book of the Law, dictated to Crowley: 'the obeah and the
wanga, the work of the wand and the work of the sword, these he shall
learn and teach.' Obeah = Obi. Wanga = Wan. Thus, Obi-Wan. And what
device is a wand one moment and a sword the next? A lightsaber, of
course; and the relevance of 'learn and teach' is obvious, since Obi-Wan
is the teacher.

- Vader's sabre is red, the colour of the sphere of Geburah, or
Severity: Obi-Wan's is blue, the colour of its opposing sphere, Chesed
or Mercy.

- Crowley makes references to 'the dwarf insane yet crafty' who is the
source of true Wisdom, obviously a reference to Yoda.

- The greatest ordeal in Crowley's A.'.A.'. system is the 'crossing of
the abyss'. One reaches the brink of a great gulf and must either
surrender everything one is and jump, or remain behind to become a
'black brother' or 'brother of the left hand path'. The 'crossing of the
abyss' is foreshadowed in A New Hope, at the point at which Luke and
Leia swing over the chasm, but is actually achieved in full in Empire
Strikes Back, at the climax of the film.

In the climax of Empire, Luke's right hand is severed at the wrist,
implying that he must take the left hand path and turn to the Dark Side,
i.e. become a 'black brother'. Faced with the choice of crossing the
Abyss or turning to the 'Left Hand Path', Luke chooses to jump, which is
the act that redeems him from a future of corruption.

- Luke is also the Horus figure, the avenger (as in Revenge of the Jedi,
the original title). In the climax of Empire, Vader (previously
identified with Set, the murderer of the father) is revealed to _be_ the
father, the dark Osiris - this being the same secret that was revealed
in the Egyptian Mysteries, namely that 'Osiris is a Black God!'

- The 'Black Brethren' are those who have 'shut themselves up', become
encased and closed off from the Universe, exactly as Vader is encased in
black armour. Their sphere on the Tree of Life is the false sphere
'da'ath', obviously the source for 'Darth'.

- Vader out of his armour proves to be a bald guy with an English
accent, uncannily reminiscent of Crowley.

Not convinced yet? Try this quote from one of Crowley's Holy Books, in
which a part of the Star Wars universe is mentioned BY NAME:

'... Thy messenger was more terrible than the Death-star.'

The messenger of the Emperor is of course Vader, who possesses (and
represents) a power far more terrible than the Death Star - the dark
side of the Force itself. As Vader himself reminds his fellow Imperials,
'The ability to destroy a planet is insignificant next to the power of
the Force.'

You might recognise this scene, too...

'the chamber was corrupt; the air stank... He enveloped me with his
demon tentacles; yea, the eight fears took hold upon me.'

Garbage compactors, anyone? However, we all know what happened next:

'I slipped from the embrace as a stone from the sling of a boy of the
woodlands. I was smooth and hard as ivory; the horror gat no hold.'

Smooth and hard as ivory indeed, for Luke is wearing stormtrooper armour
in that scene.

Well, George? Been having a bit of the old do-what-thou-wilt, have we?

Was Elvis a Transhumanist?

Written By: R.U. Sirius

Date Published: January 11, 2010

On "Three Quarks Daily," Richard Eskow makes a semi-serious case that Elvis Presley was a proto-transhumanist.

"He shot televisions, too, when he didn't like what he saw. That makes him a pioneer in the world of media interactivity, if a slightly more violent one than those that would follow....

"Another trivia item: 'What career was Elvis planning to pursue before he made it big? Electrician.'

"Elvis Presley was a man so convinced of his own powers that late in his life, fueled to excess by pills and ambition, he insisted to his companions that he could move clouds with his mind. And what song was always played over the loudspeakers as late-period Elvis took the stage? 'Also sprach Zarathustra.'"

This deserves repeating: "He shot televisions, too, when he didn't like what he saw. That makes him a pioneer in the world of media interactivity..."

That pretty much covers it, right?

Sloganic

Lysergic acid hits the spot,
Forty billion neurons, that's a lot!

-Marshall McLuhan

A Ritual to Read to Each Other

By William Stafford. If you don't know the kind of person I am and I don't know the kind of person you are a pattern that others made may prevail in the world and following the wrong god home we may miss our star. For there is many a small betrayal in the mind, a shrug that lets the fragile sequence break sending with shouts the horrible errors of childhood storming out to play through the broken dyke. And as elephants parade holding each elephant's tail, but if one wanders the circus won't find the park, I call it cruel and maybe the root of all cruelty to know what occurs but not recognize the fact. And so I appeal to a voice, to something shadowy, a remote important region in all who talk: though we could fool each other, we should consider— lest the parade of our mutual life get lost in the dark. For it is important that awake people be awake, or a breaking line may discourage them back to sleep; the signals we give—yes or no, or maybe— should be clear: the darkness around us is deep.