Showing posts with label blurgh. Show all posts
Showing posts with label blurgh. Show all posts

Wednesday, August 6, 2014

on war

"I was against...on two counts. First, the Japanese were ready to surrender and it wasn't necessary to hit them with that awful thing. Second, I hate to see our country be the first to use such a weapon." ~Dwight D. Eisenhower on Hiroshima bombing 8/6/1945

Hiroshima & Nagasaki weren't isolated events but a culmination of American policy to target civilian populations in mass terrorist bombings.

In the constant war that is ego, the target never changes: the other. Only the technologies increase the accuracy and numbers.

The fire of war is always smoldering and re-igniting: gaza and world war two and world war one and previous wars are not separate events.

Great wars are not separate from personal wars are not separate from inner psychological wars. The egoic state of consciousness is war.

The wise response to war is to see through the sides and not take yet another.

Saturday, March 29, 2014

B2 - Nisargadatta Maharaj is my guru

Nisargadatta Maharaj is my guru. I never met the man.

Some will think that’s absurd. They may be correct—I’m not speaking for them or others.

Thirty years ago, a psychological therapist summed up my personal conditioning this way: your mother taught you to be absolutely afraid of the world and your father completely failed to introduce you to the world.

I was obsessed in knowing the world. I didn’t trust the world to teach me about itself.

So I read books. I became obsessed with certain viewpoints until ultimately I discovered their weakness. I moved on to another book. Another viewpoint.

The first time I read Nisargadatta’s I Am That, I was enthralled, but I stopped midway at some point—I was appalled at something I had read. But his words kept haunting me. Six months later, I had forgotten why I had been horrified, reread the chapter in question, and couldn’t find anything repulsive—only wisdom. So, in my second attempt, I finished reading the book.

For a third act, I read Ramesh Balsekar’s Pointers from Nisargadatta, the Jean Dunn translations, and the Robert Powell translations. Meanwhile I was rereading I Am That and tweeting phrases under my @Nisargadatta_M avatar—which continues to this day. To paraphrase one of my earlier teachers: something is happening but I don’t know what it is. Exactly! There is no viewpoint.

I still read books for recreation as well. It was in such a manner I began reading Gurdjieff’s Beelzebub’s Tales to His Grandson. It wasn’t pleasurable, so I stopped. Of course, that’s Gurdjieff’s point. So I’m not speaking for him or others.

One thing I did appreciate from the first page of Gurdjieff’s three-volume Coyote tale is the first page, Friendly Advice, in which he advises one should read his “written expositions thrice.” The first is in a mechanized way. The second is as one person to another. And the third is to “fathom the gist.” I did read his Friendly Advice three times.

Nisargadatta says to his listeners, and therefore to the reader, that he, Nisargadatta Maharaj, is Consciousness speaking to Consciousness.

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Thursday, March 27, 2014

Blurgh One

It’s been five years on Twitter this month. Enough! Time to blog again. Blurgh?

Words. You can’t live with them and you can’t stop eating them.

And everyone loves their pet theories. Then they put them to sleep.

See! All is viewed through this lens of consciousness. The universe appears in this consciousness. This consciousness is god. I love it madly. 

Who loves it?

But science says this consciousness is a phenomenon of the brain, a product of the material world. See?

Wait, who says this? 

Ha! Consciousness says this. Who else?

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