concerns

For whoever is still reading, I offer this: be kind to yourselves. The world is in bad shape. And as the elders have always pointed out, it is a precise reflection of nothing more than our collective moral debasement. Yet paradoxically, the first step in improving matters is to forgive ourselves.

We have all come up short. You, me, the monk who has dedicated his life to rice bowl begging in order to hold the space of benevolent meditation 24/7 on a mountain in Tibet. JFK and ML King came up short. Kucinich, Ron Paul, Noam Chomsky and David Icke have come up short. Your favorite guru has failed to turn around the deterioration of civilization.

The problem appears to be this: we have not found power greater than that of guns and money. There are wealthy manipulators of global currency who have been responsible foremost for the current state of affairs: an endless sham war on terror heaped on top of the impoverishment of the vast majority of the world. Depleted uranium explosives are launched by the tons into Libya now, to protect the populace? To oust another bad guy like Saddam, for whom a million people were murdered?

No--it is, in my opinion, because Libya has one of the few state banks left backed by gold reserves, which means it does not kowtow to the ponzi scam of American greed and those supporting the New World Order. Soon it will be taken over by the World Bank, its oil and gold repossesed, and its economy flooded with worthless US paper dollars.

I for one am sick to hell of the New World Order. Nuclear reactors blowing up, endless wars based on absolute lies, zero media accountability, a completely corrupted government, and economic ruin everywhere. We Americans have not begun to suffer yet what we will if the overlords plans are not thwarted. We are being set up for internment camps, and indefinite detention without cause and without a shred of civil rights.

I would say the current drive to totalitarianism will put the Nazi machine to shame. But that would be misleading, because these are the very same people. The CIA was founded with the support of thousands of Nazi war criminals smuggled out of Germany at the end of the war through Operation Paperclip. NASA was as well. FEMA, the IRS and the Federal Reserve are all unconstitutional shadow government organizations in support of the same power. The last president who sought to get rid of the CIA was Kennedy. Are you getting the picture?

If not, try this one on:

This charming familial portrait shows a young George Bush Sr., center, in a German Navy uniform. Bush was involved with CIA covert operations from its inception. In front of him is Reinhard Gehlen, a prominent Nazi officer who was released by US authorities to form a CIA-proxy organization in Germany, which subsequently fomented decades of Cold War with compromised intelligence reports. To his right is the blond Martin Bormann, described as second in power only to Hitler, and responsible for the establishing the program of Jewish mass murder. Like many other Nazis, he may have survived to South America after the war.

To Bush's left are his parents and behind them, Otto Skorzeny, Hitler's primary bodyguard, from whom this photo came. He participated in clandestine CIA activities around the world after the war. Skorzeny reported that he assisted in the murder of Nikola Tesla, in order to bring the power of his Tesla Wave inventions under the control of the CIA-NWO shadow government. This is the origin of HAARP technology, to which some researchers attribute recent acceleration of environmental disasters across the globe.

One might ask what the future US President was doing in such company. This would ignore the fact that Bush was the first public figure to describe the coming New World Order, in a speech given on September 11, 1991. Whatever is going on, he has been in it up to his eyeballs for his entire life.

Lest I forget, directly behind Bush, beaming the geekish smile, is none other than the Nazi whose very name is synonymous with inhumane torture, the notorious Dr. Josef Mengele.

It is time we found a Greater Power than this.

ten-letter words

i don't like vulnerability, but with two days overdosing of weed, i have chosen it

with trying to caffeinate through the workday, with trying to date, with worrying over a young woman, i have chosen vulnerability

with dental decay, no savings, risking a request that was unanswered, i have chosen vulnerability

with trying to find some power in this life, without resorting to privilege or indebtedness to the system of organized violence, i have chosen it

with an impractical old vehicle, with gimpy ankle and sensitive hands, bad choices, too much sugar, mercury fillings, root canals, fluorescent lights, laser scanners, radiation in the wind, mutating skin

yet when i am strong and stable, patched up and coping well, i am in some ways more vulnerable

for then i am more stuck in the system of delusions and compromises that make up at best a slow death

and might just present, as it did for a coworker, out of the blue, a diagnosis of bone marrow cancer

-----

i don't know if i will make it to the forest or to the farm

or to the dental clinic today or the laundromat

or if i will even get up out of this chair at this cafe

catalepsis is very close by

i have long relied on my anger to survive it

yet sometimes lately i am not sure i have even that

revival

it is important to have a dream

i have not been satisfied with the workplace since getting back

and have been awaiting inspiration of some kind

i decided to increase my attitude and that has helped

i forget this but it is often the case

as soon as i detach a little bit from the structure of someone else's idea of work

there is both space to move

and greater appreciation for my work

because i am now working for my own satisfaction

with the idea i might do something else beginning this summer

my autonomy is further amplified

regardless of whether or not i actually take off

--i will be conversing with these hands to decide--

yet i am deeper in my skin

and in harmony with the reality of life in its current format

which is that there is less and less security in conventional plans

work ten or twenty years toward some vague plan of retirement

i am working class

i expect to work until the day i die

and i no longer resent this

for i enjoy it

i wish to learn to enjoy it more completely

security is anyway found in growth

new experience and deepening relations

skill development

sensing where one's passion

meets the world's need

and finding some use for oneself

toward the Earth

for it is She and not money

who survives

this

my friend alex's last three blogs have been about

a huge water catchment he's setting up

baby turkeys he's received

and brewing beer with some special homegrown hops

what could be better than that

------

all right it was pretty cool to get lost in the woods

it was just annoying enough

that i was more pissed than embarrassed

grateful to the one car that drove by

showing us a road was very close

though necessitating a steep rocky climb

through unexpected brambles

after three hours

it was just dark and cold enough

and we had just enough layers

food and water

to be just uncomfortable enough

for the ensuing hour plus scrambling back to the car

to have a very focused experience

with the outdoors

-----

a feeling

continues to orient westward

souls talking

despite a thousand obstacles

a mutual reminding of dreams

one a yet-to-be defined

persistent travel calling

and one of digging

perhaps recent urban setbacks

a call to get further away from this civilization

and follow through with either the wwoofing

or planting trees

i think

this

is the summer

what a week

feeling grateful for consistent reports of minimal radiation reaching the US

i have felt much less psychotically alone the last couple days

feeling grief today

for Japan as I shopped at TaLin for miso soba and seaweed

a coworker was diagnosed with bone marrow cancer

and my sister's best friend threw herself on the railroad tracks on LI

not good for my sister's state of mind as she is already wheelchair bound with MS

me i just am losing gears in the van and have a cracked crown needing dental work

but no coverage yet and taxes to pay and such

at least the san diego trip is off which is a bit disappointing but i feel saner actually

just a little lacking in chi

highlights have been online empathy chats by which i have been contributing to others

and hopefully some groovy moonrise as i prepare for a bit of equinox celebration

as life carries on

50 Japanese Workers

headlines on the times are always suspect

but i found this one helpful to me

personalizing the nuclear catastrophe that is

altering the world daily and too big to grasp

giving me permission to cry in this cafe

-----

it is reported there are 50 workers left onsite at the fukishima plant

crawling through dark shafts with oxygen tanks on their backs

trying desperately to rig malfunctioning water pumps

and prevent the environmental disaster of meltdown

this is what all the supposedly high tech precautions

vaunted gizmos and redundant safety measures

of the self-assured scientists of the nuclear industry

come down to

50 heroes trying to save their country

knowing full well

they are dead

-----

it is no coincidence there are exactly 50 workers

who have been sent into mission impossible

it is the kototama principle again

although only a few know it

50 is a magic number in Japanese mythology

it is the number of sounds i chant in the morning

it represents the full flowering of human capacity

and someone in Japan apparently

still knows this

-----

perhaps magic will find its way

in the fifty's frantic efforts

yet even if entirely futile

today

very soon

one way or another

this ticking half-life we are living

in the shadowy satanic arrangement of the world

will turn over

eat seaweed

half an hour to get on the train if i'm gonna make it to santa fe as planned, yet i just poured myself another cup of mate from a fresh pot, so things are tipping toward staying down in the concrete wasteland

the van is losing its gears and the steering is feeling even more loose than ever, so i called about a dodge van i saw on the street yesterday even bigger than the econoline, still gets 12 mpg, so would still cost 700 bucks to get to sd and back, i really need another old toyota like i had which would cut the cost to $250 or so

japanese reactors blowing up can't be good, hopefully it's not plutonium dispersing into the atmosphere because we are downwind folks, so i for one am eating more seaweed, which helped people survive hiroshima

i've had to keep a bit of distance around that tragedy, having been personally so immersed in Japanese ways for so long, chanting a form of the Japanese alphabet the last 29 years believe it or not, thank you Sensei for teaching me about these times at the end of the scientific material civilization

now hundreds of thousands of people missing and dead, plus the complete and utter destruction of the illusion of our safe modern lives

i haven't taken too seriously the specific calender predictions around 2012, because it is all speculative, but i think in general people are on the right track with it

i had read that march 9 one guy calculated as the beginning of the final quickening to the coming transformation, and with the advent of earthquakes of new magnitudes-tsunamis-nuclear catastrophes the following day, that prediction looks to have been very prescient

so much suffering and sadness, and looking a lot like the edgar cayce visions we've heard about for many years, with the Japanese coastline moving 8 feet and such

seems we are paying the price for our human arrogance in believing we can design a material civilization without conversing with the Earth, nuclear energy being one of the pinnacles of our arrogance, we begin to see how quickly the entire civilization could be wiped out

so there's not much to do anymore but pray and meditate and plant a garden, ego pursuits suddenly seem as meaningless as we have glimpsed them to be for some time, like going back to school so i can have a "career", and the spirit practices that seemed so abstract are suddenly becoming extremely useful and practical, strange times likely to get much stranger

i know it is time i begin teaching kototama

just started an online empathy conversation, so no train today, just want to create more gentle spaces to be human together--chanting, empathy groups, musicmaking without pressure to be novel or great, informal barter, ritual spaces like the upcoming equinox gathering, gardens, ecstatic dance, a beer on a patio, and so many more

i've also had an epiphany about being vegetarian again all of a sudden, last night over carne asada, hard to describe but i just don't ever need to eat flesh again--the waste, the grossness, the bacteria, the suffering, all of it and more in one very obvious moment

somehow connected to the catastrophe in Japan waking us all up to our real situation on this planet

calling

i've decided to become a pagan

in an active sense

deep paganism is one important strand that has unified my life

in a holy way

it is essentially the realization of the imperative

to be in conversation with Earth

cats communicate

snakes have personalities

rocks emanate benevolence

listen

integrity issues

i have cracked into a neighbor's wifi

and now am online sitting on the porch

of the nicely landscaped front yard

why don't i know how to do this

relax

without medicine

it's a strange world

and certain medicines help me deal with

the fact that normal awareness these days

is completely useless

i am only frustrated when i am straight

the world my job my life path relationships

everything has gotten out of hand

in stupidity

-----

i didn't plan on following through

with hopping on the neighbor's wifi

i tried it thinking it wouldn't work

and after 30 seconds shut it down

thinking i was done with it

but the next time i'd turned the computer on

she had figured out a way through

and now i am illicit

-----

kind of like other aspects of my murky moral life

headed one way or another to certain disaster

i'm getting fat as well as now being nearly bald

i'm overeating because i am depressed

it's partly this and partly that

partly work sucking and wanting adventure

foreign country and/or climb mountains

partly wanting some relational fulfillment

some companion like others seem to find for themselves

in a natural way

but which for me would be a f*cking miracle

-----

relaxing helps

i am planning gardens and thinking about a dog

the scope of my life has been so compressed

due to my sensitivity to holocaust

underneath all the rigamarole my ego tries to drum up

i am at an age when meaningful contribution becomes

an even more important consideration

i have tried social work and teaching nonviolence

sobriety and use of mind alterations

music labor management farming higher education

anthropology acupuncture aikido tantra polyamory monogamy

shamanism men's retreats moving staying and a million other things

and i have realized that despite all of my research

personal integrity and intellectual vigor

various creative efforts for nearly thirty years

willingness to both recklessness and years of stoicism

it looks like i have completely failed at the only thing that was ever important to me

turning this world around

from the path of genocide

to something more creative

full of the beauty of both exceptional joy

and the right amount of grief to learn by

seems it's gonna take a miracle

seeing the possibility for a more cooperative world way

that instead of getting worse all the time

gets a little better

every

day

-----

i came to new mexico for the kototama path

messianic as it was

and ended up in the mental wards

i should i suppose forget about the corrupt world

and just go live my life

but after my ancestors tried to make their way

within a society geared toward killing millions of innocent people

how can one not seek to save the rest?

yet instead i am bottom feeding

off the last broken shards of wealth supporting

a dying empire that has also killed millions of innocent people

so tell me

what does it mean now

to be true to myself?

stoner dude loses phone

well i may not ever get to writing the great novel

but at least i can have the dumbest blog title

it is accurate to the caricature i've become of myself

in recent days

i look something like beethoven

all grey hair and lines

but not as cool

more bozo the clown

fortunately i live in albuquerque

where today i saw a mohawk

gelled out to a sharklike point

some couple inches beyond the forehead

i may not be that creative

but my burque ugliness is at least

approaching the median

-----

i've developed a codependent relationship

with my phone

i was waiting around godot-like

for texts from you know who

so i just quit checking the thing

to try to ween myself

and after a few hours

i went to try the phone

and it was gone

seemingly hijacked to another dimension

along with the vanished bike lock

and the strangely awol fiddle pickup

of the past week

-----

i thought maybe i should look around outside

so i went to look for a flashlight

couldn't find one

but then i remembered where i had a flashlight

on my phone

wah wah

i was sitting next to the pajama men before they grabbed a wall seat

i wish i were in france these days sitting in cafes drinking away the day

it is brown outside from the dirt in the wind

a young woman prepares to leave into the weather

nice hat

i have not heard from my beloved in days

off with her main man to the wilderness

day five i think

so i have been substituting various mind-altering practices

-----

who reads blogs anymore

maybe if i offer some of that groovy added-value content

it is so easy to get down these days

the world moves far too fast

indeed it has roared by

everyday my personality vanishes and returns anew

ready to travel to distant lands

and dissipate

-----

i must apparently ban the word polyamory from my vocabulary

say it and people immediately uniformly think

a**hole

and dismiss you

even if it is simply your choice

to declare that you never wish to possess anyone

the most liberal will insist

you are an unrealistic fool

for monogamy is far more natural a course

dismissing out of hand

the overwhelming antrhopological evidence

that there have been far more poly cultures

and the fascinating questions that stimulates

in regards to human cultural and economic organization

toward group wellness

honesty

trust and common interest

as opposed to possession

jealousy and violent defense

of relentless self-interest

-----

there are just some areas of human experience

very resistant to consciousness i guess

you cant discuss what the world is really like

shadow governments and criminal banking

torture and enslavement

or what a world might be like without them

and other such outmoded institutions of suffering

well you can have your decaying order

arrogant to the end

the older i get

the more important open doors become

and so the more i choose the liminality of chaos

in all matters

-----

soon i am off

to discuss such existential matters

over beer

long philosophical Q&A

When I get a little quiet, the question arises, what game am I playing? The follow-up is of course: is this the game I wish to play?

I've dabbled in a bunch of interesting approaches to life in recent years. These have included the games of musicmaking, nonviolent communication community, mythopoetic men's retreats, plant medicines, tantra, polyamory, and so forth. Each has offered a fun orientation toward living a more deeply satisfying life, though perhaps none fulfilling their promise, at least for me. So what's it all about?

Things were good in Burque before I left a year ago. The job was loving me, I was socking away $500 a month, and had a pretty cool little place with a growing community of friends nearby. Even a brief flowering of love, or something near to it, had unfolded for a moment.

Things were good in OB too--great in some ways. I loved the movement into a new scene, the sweet community I grew into, the ocean, a variety of new stimuli for the muse. While the job was progressively awful, and the Anglo-trafficky-urbanness generally annoying, there was a lovely sense of unfolding for me there.

I missed the window to transfer out there to a better store, out of misplaced loyalty to a lousy boss. That could have been a useful move. But there were forces of awareness also pushing my envelope toward a post-capitalist experience and a taste of street living.

When I honestly look at all aspects of political, moral, ecological and existential information available, integrity calls for some radical choices. And living without money, as much as possible, is one very viable and vibrant choice, lending itself to direct learning and often luminous clarity.

It is similar to the choice to become vegan in that regard: another obvious choice once one takes the blinders off of our awareness. Yet I choose neither veganism or living without money. I find in such purity of choice I actually lose balance between the clear light of my A dimension, and the needs of my U dimension for certain murky elements which are actually supported by unconsciousness. The capacity to sleep is related to this.

Nevertheless, I continue to pursue awareness. I am certain there is no perfect alignment between these dimensions of awareness and drive. It has been my ego's endlessly frustrating trip to try and merge these, since such a taste of such paradise at age 19. It's since proven more of a trap than a game. And from an ecological perspective, there are not nearly enough Earths to support each one of us fully self-actualizing, at least according to some decrepit upper-middle class esthetic.

As folksinger Utah Philips points out, we are educated for many impressionable years with someone else's class background. Taught the history of the ruling class, we have few references as to how to make useful choices when facing the demands of life directly. We think we must be somehow great, in the eyes of some projected world. Then, it turns out we ourselves are those eyes! And we then face the task of gathering truly useful resources. And we truly begin to seek authentic meaningful connections with one another, find our teachers and ancestors, seek wisdom in poems and conversations with trees...and from whatever else we can pull out of the river of human life experience gifted to us by others having coped with living on this Earth.

I recognize this is the field, at least, that I have been playing on. Often in daily living, amidst work and conventions, there is little reflection back to me from which I can gather meaning. This quest for the muse to unfold my humanness often seems vague and adolescent in terms of the world's judgment. At best, it is a poet's game, or a vastly overextended phase of finding myself.

But this self-evaluation is not my concern. I have been on this course since I was a small child.

In Santa Fe, somewhere underneath the high rents of its adobe disneyland, there is a common cultural understanding of this quest for direct spiritual unfoldment. There are still mushrooms sprouting in the mountains, various pagan ceremonies, and the inherent paradox of living at 7000 feet. There are rich and varied cultural references of the experiences of Native American traditions near, persisting in the people and the landscapes both. There is also a whole new age lexicon of stuff like the lost continent of Lemuria, Mayan calendar predictions since the Harmonic Convergence, Akashic records, and a million other occult offerings. And while some may be more useful or imaginative than others for our individual tastes, all these references point to cultural acceptance of focusing somewhere beyond the daily conventional grind.

Spending twenty years in this cultural milleu, I have sought several times to live elsewhere and compare notes experientially. Burque, at 5000 feet, offers some strange in-between land, where translation between the inner and outer worlds may be possible. But the general rules of the game remain the same anywhere...arrange the externals as simply as possible, in order to allow the dance between the yin and yang to unfold.

By moving back and forth between awareness and drive, there is not so much synchronization that comes, but an unfolding of the field--the canvas--of our lives. A concomitant geometric spiral of existential frustration also grows within the unrealizable potential of immortality we imagine for ourselves therein. And that is the illusion of maya-world referred to in some areas of Buddhism.

But then something strange happens on the journey. Amidst absolute and utter failure of all that is personal in this life, ultimately the failing of health itself for each of us...amidst that utter dark emptiness, something else pops up. And there is nothing to describe it really. But Viktor Frankl definitely found it, and offered some nice references in his Logotherapy book, Man's Search for Meaning. Thich Nhat Hanh, who like Frankl faced genocidal-level suffering, also describes it clearly in books such as Being Peace.

What arises in the void is the capacity that remains within us to proactively smile and vibrate Yes!

This startling activity proves somehow satisfying to the deep longing that comes through such a dark night. This satisfaction proves independent of any attachment to the external aspects of whatever we are saying yes to in the world. The commitment of that moment's Yes!, this essential activity of our humanness, is inherently radical, cutting across robotic activity of all kinds. Yet rather than insisting on traumatic revolution, it offers an ongoing joyful invitation into the aliveness of this moment.

Some people call it gratitude practice, and that seems correct to me. Either way, magnetism happens from the genius-zone of this gift beyond ego. Energy radiates out from this zero-point, and affects the world, bringing new light in. It may last a moment or an hour or a month, touch that one customer in line and then be gone, channel a song through, or stir up a whole new beatnik counterculture scene...

Whether it is through plant medicines, empathy practice, hara meditation, postural breathing, hugging a tree, dancing, sound vibrations, just smiling, tantra, or gratitude...

this is the game I am playing