[click image]...
You don't bother with this nihilistic imagery if you've picked love over fear. That is to say you stop wasting everyone's time illustrating the anger, contempt, frustration, helplessness, sophistry and other vitality-sapping attitudes occasioned by your abject existential terror, and you head for the LOVE that gives rise to vitality-enhancing attitudes. Sometimes those aren't "nice" or "polite" or "socially acceptable" or even "nonviolent"... but they are love-powered and positive anyway. Do you think Dees' latest, here, is of that latter sort? Well, do you?
Yeah, yeah, we could make a cogent argument that it is grossly understating the predicament, or we could make lists of all the tracks left off that Greatest Hits album cover, or we could pick one of the bits and post the perfect link as authority for it, or we could spend all our time cranking out evidence for all of it, or the conservatives and libertarians could vie with the liberals and leftists in a continental tug-of-war to decide which side has to wear all this shit.... We could react in a thousand different ways and almost all of them would be labors of manifest futility.
Nice goin'.
Or, and this is novel, we could identify all this as fear-powered helplessness and do better.
I know yer too wiped to do it, but if you do not do it, you will NEVER not be too wiped, NEVER not be too helpless, and there is nothing EVER more important between the span from your birth to your death than breaking this negative cycle. It's the whole reason you are here. You might better never have been born if you can't get to it, and if you are hoping to get to it when you retire, you are going to be one lucky son-of-a-bitch if you get that chance. Do you feel lucky?
Yes, that was my Dirty Harry voice.
...
Phil sent me a lecture by some professor of Buddhism to listen to today. I did. It was hard to bear. We gotta think of a new word for this. Damn, we SO do. I've been freaking about this for some nearly twenty years and STILL have not come up with the new word for it, but "Buddhism" has become more akin to, say, "Calvinism" or "chauvinism" or "relativism" or "reductionism" or "positivism" or "priapism" than to denoting the art of freedom, the science of liberation, the practice of fundamental reality... any of the ways one might state the object of attention to any Buddhism, let alone Zen.
The lecturer made a lot out of stationary points blinking in and out of existence to give the illusion of motion and so I know he's done a fuck of a lot of reading, but he COMPLETELY missed the part about the fact of this meaning in each and every one of those blinks is the choice to incarnate another way... to reincarnate... and while he made it clear to anyone paying attention that these points are not even distinct from each other in the sense we think of them, he completely missed the implications of THAT too. He went on to state he had NO understanding of reincarnation after he'd just did a grand job of describing it fully. He even didn't forget to mention that time doesn't exist.
How thick can you be?
Only MASTERS can go to university to study Buddhism without ruin.
The same is true of people going to "teaching centers" or "practice centers" or "monasteries" or whatever they call a "Buddhist" establishment that takes students.
You're fucked. Just fucked.
You have to wake up BEFORE you start or you're fucked.
[This is NOT as completely impossible as it sounds.]
...
I also finished that vexing "Buddhist" memoir I was mentioning a while back when I was getting the last work on my teeth done in Fort Bragg. That was written by some putz who has had a great deal of Buddhist education, even from some highly-respected Buddhists, and UTTERLY missed the point at every angle from which he was aimed. There is printed IRREFUTABLE proof of this all over the place as a consequence.
I have a pretty good idea about the ONLY hope of any ACTUAL Buddhism carrying on into the future and it means one of two things: [1] I gotta develop galactic energy to aim at someone perfectible to get the clue; or [2] I gotta perfect it and get cracking. I am unable to choose between them. So I'm trying to do both, while also trying to do neither, because if I pile in behind the oceanic need to do them, it will set me back as far as that ocean can shove me. This is the worst. The worst of my entire life. There is almost no one on this planet who groks how much feeling flows through here.
My old boyfriends have the first part of a clue. The jackass I taught to ride had a dream that I was running down a hill toward him, got hit and squished by a train while crossing the tracks, and then got up off the tracks and kept running toward him as though nothing had happened.
I said, "Sheesh. Scared much?"
He answered that it had terrified him and the relief of me getting up off the tracks was all that kept him from losing it. No. No. It was what terrified him. I was as scary before I took up the Zen, just different scary than this.
Anyway, I'm going to think of my having been decked by the extra-terrestrial bodhisattva surgeon god as that train, and of myself as getting up off those tracks. You need it.
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