Ultimately, happiness comes down to choosing between the discomfort of becoming aware of your mental afflictions and the discomfort of being rules by them.

Strange consequences

The problem is, if god is dead, then you lose the most important word in your language and you will need a substitute. God was one end, one extreme, and when one extreme disappears from your mental vision the necessary and inevitable is that you will fall to the other extreme, and that is what has happened... Instead of god, fuck has become the most important word in our language.

In between

Since all phenomena (or phenomenally appearing things) which arise, present no reality in themselves, they are said to be of noumena (in other words, they are of the Voidness, regarded as the noumenal background or Source of the physical universe of the phenomena). Though not formed into anything, yet they give shape to everything. Thus it is that phenomena and noumena are in unison, and said to be of one nature. They are, like ice and water, reflection and mirror, two aspects of a single thing.

Cloudseeding

Humanity has always invested heavily in any scheme that offers escape from the body. And why not? Material reality is such a mess. Some of the earliest "religious" artefacts, such as Neanderthal ochre burials, already suggest a belief in immortality. All modern (i.e. post-paleolithic) religions contain the "Gnostic trace" of distrust or even outright hostility to the body and the "created" world. Contemporary "primitive" tribes and even peasant-pagans have a concept of immortality and of going-outside-the-body (ec-stasy) without necessarily exhibiting any excessive body-hatred. The Gnostic Trace accumulates very gradually (like mercury poisoning) till eventually it turns pathological. Gnostic dualism exemplifies the extreme position of this disgust by shifting all value from body to "spirit". This idea characterizes what we call "civilization".

Sinking

The people travel

from here to there

coming 

going

Their destination

reverses itself

over and over again

The Tao remains firmly

planted in one place

and yet cannot be left behind

Four kings guard

East, West, North and South

The paths they guard

are precious

and cannot be separated

Each has a colour

that can't be blended

Each has a sound

that can't be imitated

The center remains still

It has no colour or sound

yet the rest could not exist

without it 

Antidote to weltschmerz

We must rapidly begin the shift from a "thing-oriented" society to a "person-oriented" society. When machines and computers, profit motives and property rights are considered more important than people, the giant triplets of racism, materialism, and militarism are incapable of being conquered.

We are in an age that assumes the narrowing trends of specialization to be logical, natural, and desirable. Consequently, society expects all earnestly responsible communication to be crisply brief. . . . In the meantime, humanity has been deprived of comprehensive understanding. Specialization has bred feelings of isolation, futility, and confusion in individuals. It has also resulted in the individual's leaving responsibility for thinking and social action to others. Specialization breeds biases that ultimately aggregate as international and ideological discord, which, in turn, leads to war.

Our legal systems, our religions, our educational systems are all deeply concerned with controlling pleasure. We have created detailed rules and customs surrounding sex, drugs, food, alcohol, and even gambling. Jails are bursting with people who have violated laws that proscribe certain forms of pleasure or who profit by encouraging others to do so.

Most experiences in our lives that we find transcendent - whether illicit vices or socially sanctioned ritual and social practices as diverse as exercise, meditative prayer, dancing 'til you drop, and playing on the internet: They all evoke neural signals that converge on a small group of interconnected brain areas called the medial forebrain pleasure circuit. Evolution has, in effect, hardwired us to catch a pleasure buzz from a wide variety of experiences from crack to cannabis, from meditation to masturbation, from Bordeau to beef. 

 

Physiologists have long been in the habit of studying not the reactions of the whole organism but the reactions of isolated segments; the so-called reflexes. While it may seem justifiable to construct the reactions of the organism as a whole from the individual reflexes, such an attempt is in reality doomed to failure, since the reactions produced in an isolated element cannot be counted upon to occur when the same element is part of the whole, on account of the mutual inhibitions which the different parts of the organism produce upon each other when in organic connection; and it is, therefore, impossible to express the conduct of a whole animal as the algebraic sum of the reflexes of its isolated segments.... It would, therefore, be a misconception to speak of tropism as of reflexes, since tropisms are reactions of the organism as a whole, while reflexes are reactions of isolated segments. Reflexes and tropisms agree, however, in one respect, inasmuch as both are obviously of a purely physico-chemical character.

The time-binding capacity or energy of man (no matter what time is—if it is), which is unique to man, is a most subtle complex; it is the highest known energy and probably has many subdivisions. Ears are sensitive to the vibration of the air. Eyes are sensitive to the more subtle vibrations of light; in a similar way, the time-binding apparatus is sensitive to the most subtle energies; besides which it has the capacity to register not only all of our sensations but also the time-binding energies of other people; and it apparently has the capacity to register the energies of the universe.

Portal

There is no doubt that the engineering of human society is a difficult and complicated problem of tremendous ethical responsibility, for it involves the welfare of mankind throughout an unending succession of generations. The science of Human Engineering can not be built upon false conceptions of human nature. It can not be built on the conception of man as a kind of animal; it can not be built on the conception of man as a mixture of natural and supernatural. It must be built upon the conception of man as being at once natural and higher in dimensionality than the animals. It must be built upon the scientific conception of mankind as characterized by their time-binding capacity and function. This conception radically alters our whole view of human life, human society, and the world.

A zen student once asked his teacher Ikkyu, a fifteenth century Zen master, to sum up the highest wisdom. The master responded to this enormous question with a single word scratched in the sand: "Attention."

The student wasn't satisfied and asked him to elaborate.  Ikkyu wrote: "Attention. Attention. Attention."

Humans who are alive during the 21st century, 13.7 billion years of evolution after the ‘big bang’, are extraordinarily fortunate. The shift to intentional evolution is one of the most significant evolutionary transitions that can occur on any planet on which life emerges. We have the unique opportunity to contribute to its successful completion on this planet. And if we choose to make this contribution, we will do so consciously—we will be aware that we are contributing intentionally to the successful completion of a pivotal evolutionary event on this planet.

If evolution is happening everywhere in a global fashion, where is it heading? For centuries human beings assumed that we were the highest goal of God's creation, and despite Darwin's shocking demotion of humans to one species among many, we still believe we hold a privileged place. But it's not at the top of the ladder of life. Instead, we are the one creature who grasps that creativity is infinite. Evolution is heading everywhere, not to an end point. The ultimate goal of the universe is to unfold without limits. To put it in a word, evolution is becoming more and more free, and its ultimate goal is total freedom.

Conceptual confusion shows up when our ideas about ideas. thoughts and concepts fail to coincide with their true symbolic nature and purpose. The nature of Conceptual Reality is symbolic, in that concepts represent and reflect rather than create reality... unless we're referring to conceptual reality itself. One example is when we are identified with our thoughts and are unable to discriminate who we are from what we know. When we are too close to our thoughts, it is difficult to articulate. A certain detachment from thinking is necessary to create the space for a playful intellect. Creative thought is excited when we realize the possibility that thoughts don't belong to anyone. Concepts are autonomous images travelling freely from one mind to the next. Our ability to concentrate on a singular concept keeps it in our mind until we're ready to let it go. It may be a popular misconception to believe we: 1) Create our own concepts. 2) Own them and 3) Can forbid their use to others. This is simply a naive notion about the true nature of Thought. (Copyright laws withstanding).

The time-bound mode of consciousness is deeply embedded in the human psyche. But what we are doing here is part of a profound transformation that is taking place in the collective consciousness of the planet and beyond: the awakening of consciousness from the dream of matter, form and separation. The ending of time. We are breaking mind patterns that have dominated human life for eons. Mind patterns that have created unimaginable suffering on a vast scale. I am not using the word evil. It is more helpful to call it unconsciousness or insanity.

Religion made the terrible mistake when it consigned the body to the "lower" physical world while the soul was lifted to the "higher" spiritual realm. A functioning soul is not so different from a functioning body. Both are involved in the same things - awareness and energy - that make life possible. "I am my body" and "I am my soul" are two faces of the same truth. The problem is that we have lost contact with the soul. It wasn't created to be useless, we made it that way.

One purpose of chaos, paradox, nonsense, and absurdity is to set itself against the linear world. These are not meant to take the place of linear knowledge or functions, but to act as a point of focus calling our attention and awareness to the something(s) which the linear model has missed, thus breathing new life into the predictable.

Further, our non-linear models help us to see old facts in new and exciting ways. If there is a summum bonum it lies in reformulation and utility in the service of tolerating more of the unknown. The function of Monotheism is to control the anxiety created by the unknown. Monotheism is a form of glue which attempts to hold an expanding world together.

I saw a man upon the stair,

a little man that was not there,

he wasn't there again today;

Gee, I wish he'd go away.

Dualism... Without it there can hardly be good literature. With it, there most certainly can be no good life.
"I" affirms a separate and abiding me substance, "am" denies the fact that all existence is relationship and change. "I am." Two tiny words, but what an enormity of untruth! The religiously minded dualist calls homemade spirits from the vasty deep; the nondualist calls the vasty deep into his spirit, or, to be more accurate, he finds that the vasty deep is already there.

It is not just a riot of blots and blurs and disjointed jottings linked by spurts of speed... it only looks as like it as damn it.

Fairness? Decency? How can you expect fairness or decency on a planet of sleeping people?