Stars at Elbow and Foot

     The only way to consume less is to desire less. To desire less, one must understand that what one has is all that one needs, unless it stops working. Then you may need to replace the one-of-stuff that you cannot use any longer.       What I want no one can buy.       The only thing that I want are ideas for writing. I have them, too, but I do not harness them as I should. I suffered an injury that has prevented me from going too deep into Thought-Space to experience the ideas that I want to use.       The injury was self-inflicted. I did this to myself. I'm the victim and the criminal.       I hurt myself so that my family could survive. If I kept going the way I did, we would be poor and starving, or maybe I would have broken through to the successful side of life in which I made things up for a living. HAHAHA!       You can’t know the multiverse, the many branchings...

 Brooding and plotting a bit tonight. Vaccuuming always gets me in this kind of mood.

I meet and deal with people who do not have an original thought in their heads. Everyday I’m confronted with the same words and phrases that come out of their mouths. It takes everything within me to not outwardly cringe.  Am I actually talking to living people?  It's like talking to some artificially constructed  simulacrum  of a person. Am I walking amongst beings that are not fully formed? Abominations.  I might as well be talking to a doll, it’s just that the eyes aren’t quite as dead as a doll’s.  I am surrounded by the living dead, And there are very few exits.

These ramblings are my attempt to understand some things that may not be understandable, but can only be taken a position on, even if that position is that I do not understand them. Are we puppets that have been created through the accident of consciousness as Thomas Ligotti believes ? This is a belief, albeit a bleak and pessimistic one, like any other belief man creates to make sense of the meaning of his life.  Atheism is a belief just like Christianity, and all of the beliefs are at odds with other beliefs because they declare truth where there is no truth to be verified except by belief or faith or dogma to be recited like some robot that has been programmed for this purpose. I'm begging you not to be a robot, which reveals that I do not side with Ligotti on his belief in a world cursed by conscious puppets.  The problem with belief is that it is created by people, and people are not perfect, nor perfectly good, or very smart. Their biases creep into whatever belief they ...

There is a hungry ghost within me, haunting online stores and desiring things that I/he does not need and may not truly want. Once the ghost obtains these things, it will enjoy them. There is the joy that the novelty of the new provides, a dopamine rush once the package arrives and he gets his grasping hands on the newly procured item. The ghost is excited. He opens it and admires the new thing, starts to use it. What he finds is that the new thing is what he expected it to be, maybe even more, or so the ghost thinks. The senses are keenly focused on the new thing and its use. The ghost smiles. The hunger has been satiated. It thinks that it is becoming more defined. The ghost thinks that it has become more than the spectral thing it was before obtaining the object of its desire. It feels complete. Now its life can be more fulfilling like the people who have reviewed the thing he wanted. Like the ads showing people using the shiny, always new things, forever smiling and using the th...

 It doesn't matter what you believe becaue the universe will give you what's true every time. You could believe that the Earth is flat, but trying communicating from one end of the world to another and you'll see the limitations of that theory. Try believing that vaccines don't work, something that was proven with Polio, and you'll end up in an ICU, or worse, in a casket.  The universe doesn't care what you believe or how hard you believe in it. If it isn't true, then it's false. Facts are binary, even if you think that they aren't. This is not Schrödinger's cat. There are not 2 states happening simultaneously. There is the truth, and that other thing that is not truth. So believe what you want. In the end, the truth will still be the truth and the world will go on even as you don't.

I started meditating again. The last time I had seriously meditated was before the kids were born, and that was not a Zazen meditation, but something new and not that productive. Let's stop with the vaguries. It was imaginative, but nothing real nor good came from it. So I'm back up to 15 minute sessions of sitting in Zazen or mantra medtitation. For a while I made it a game, but that was diluting the process. I've taken a more gentle and traditional aproach to medtitating. I set my iPhone's timer to 15 minutes and sit, concentrating on my breathing or a mantra. I have this afterglow from meditating.  After meditating I am the happiest and most calm and clear that I am all day, but this lasts for a few hours and fades. The pitfalls of life and work stream back in and slowly chip away at my ability to remain calm and accepting. So there's improvement, and there's more improvements to be made.  I need to sit and do the work, probably longer and at least twice a da...

      Hi, Old Friend. It's been a long time since we talked. Too long. I've been trying to make something out of myself, but it seems that what I've made is not what I'd intended. There was supposed to be creativity and prose involved, not business emails and revenue watching. How did this happen? Slowly at first, and then all at once.       There are actual living beings dependent on me for survival, so I do what I do and my family survives- even flourishes! I don't feel like I'm flourishing. I feel like I'm jumping through other people's hoops for prizes and acceptance. I'm more comfortable financially now, probably the most comfortable I've ever been, but something had to be sacrificed for that to happen. There was a price that had to be payed. The death of a dream, maybe.       You get older and you watch things fade. Eyesight. Speed. Dreams. I'm not the dreamer anymore. Now my kids are the dreamers, and I help facilitate t...

Why do people not reply to our hellos and goodbyes?  What brought my attention to this was a trip to Paris. Before my trip, I had read that people over there are very big on being polite and on saying hello and goodbye. Once I was over there, I tried to practice this and I noticed that I started having a greater awareness of others. I thought that it was a beautiful thing that an entire city of people seemed to encourage this awareness and respect of other people. Since that trip over five years ago, I have kept practicing this. It is amazing how many people would rather treat you like an inanimate object than acknowledge that you are someone alive and worthy of mutual respect. I once read that one of the biggest problems in African countries where war and killing was a commonplace thing was that children would just walk right up to the bodies of the dead and poke and beat them with sticks and further defile the bodies. There was a loss of the importance ...

Have you seen Terence Malick's Tree of Life?  It speaks about the way of nature and the way of grace, a conflict within man and the very world we inhabit. It seems that there seems to be a lot more of the way of nature and less of the way of grace now.

via One Surrealist a Day Sunday Dalí: Phantasmagoria, 1930. Oil on panel, 69 x... : Sunday Dalí: Phantasmagoria , 1930. Oil on panel, 69 x 44 cm. Property of Jack Nicholson, Beverly Hills, CA. The keys on the stand that support the image of Dalí’s mother-as-recepticle suggest that ...

Chaos Cinema Part 1 on Vimeo This is the long Now of entertainment; jump cuts, shaky cam, disorientation. Hail Chaos Cinema and its prophet, Michael Bay!

via Ignatian Spirituality:

Being Embodied : "To understand embodiment, it is helpful to look at its opposite, being un-embodied." "It is easy to fall into an un-embodied state; it's easy to lose yourself and to not be aware that you have become un-embodied, and not notice until the signs are screaming at you from every direction. Our culture supports and encourages its citizens to be un-embodied. In this culture of enslavement to socially dysfunctional norms, becoming embodied is a revolutionary act." read more

Sun rises in tears Birds start singing from green trees Sounds end in silence

There is no 2012. But there are end times. Each one of us will have an end of the world. It will be the day that we die. There. No crappy Michael Bay-ish Apocalypse Armageddon. No UFO brothers returning from the ancient past to enlighten or destroy us. Just the world and the weirdness of our lives and myths and imaginations and each of us with our own personal Apocalypse, just without the digital effects and the really beautiful people. It's that, or the Universe wanted movies to watch and conspiracy blogs to waste its time on. And whatever you believe, you are mostly wrong. I'm sure that the real end will be no big thing, kind of like the time I had a root canal. I spent weeks thinking about the drilling and the pain, remembering Dustin Hoffman in Marathon Man under the drill of a NAZI bastard diamond hunter. And when it was all done, I tasted blood for a few hours, my jaw was sore, and my mouth was foolishly numb from Novocaine. Not that much pain. Not that much terror. Defin...

Some people believe that Superman is broken. I for one am not sure that he is broken, but I believe the character is in need of a tune-up. If I have one problem with Superman, it's that he has become a god - an all powerful god. If you want Superman to be relevant, you have to scale back his powers. You have to weaken Superman. The closest thing to this I've seen is in Grant Morrison's All-Star Superman and in Bryan Singer's underrated Superman Returns . The only time this alien from another world's stories become emotionally resonant are when Superman is in mortal or moral danger. Now I admit there are somethings you cannot do to Superman, the character: Superman cannot be corrupted. He has to remain the moral center of the DC universe. He has to be better than any man or super-powered man alive. Superman's true character and strength is not that he is all powerful, but that he is powerful enough to be the man of last resort to save us all by doing the right t...

I think that god will destroy the universe, not because we've been bad, but because we've become boring. What if we're a simulation god has run, only, instead of simulating god or whatever its grand design was, the simulation is simulating the simulation. A referential reference without end. Am I having a semantic apocalypse ? I don't know. This is what I get for reading too much Baudrillard .

I've been wondering if the people and organizations that have been lawfully or dogmatically providing us answers wouldn't do better to be offering us more questions. Especially where religion & spirituality are concerned, I'm not sure I trust or want my religion or spiritual organization to provide me with all of the answers. I think more questions are needed. Questions that challenge, that disturb, that bring about change.