The Ratzaz Diaries

A Brief Note, Apology

2012-01-26T20:00:00.000-06:00

I've had to temporarily turn on comment moderation for this site, thanks to some asinine posting by an obvious illiterate, sometime today. Normally I welcome idiots as self-illustrative, but some topics are verboten, especially at sensitive times. Hopefully anyone who wants to post an honest comment won't mind waiting a few hours for it to appear, and if I ever locate the moron who was posting from an ID obviously manufactured just for the occasion, i.e. anonymously, I'll let you all know exactly who it was. Deal?

American Yoga: A Perspective

2012-01-14T09:05:00.002-06:00

I'm sure most of you who follow these Diaries recognize Kali. This particular image captures most of what I've always found so much fascinating about her - her darkest aspect. Academic inquiry about Kali about her can be frustrating because as one of the three entities who are the most common objects of devotional followings in India, along with Siva and Vishnu, her following is necessarily diverse and features aspects of maternity and warmth - but this is the image I've always held of her and always loved. I carry it in some place deep inside where I cherish it, and I bring Kali out to fight and counterbalance the Rainbow Moonbeam school of Eastern thought wherever I find it. And I find it a lot.

This New Year's Eve, I was brought by a friend to a "kirtan" held in a local studio, its last event before closing. I found this a bit sad, as I'd been to the studio quite a few times, though not recently and always enjoyed its particular urban ambience - in the basement of what used to be a Maxwell House coffee warehouse in downtown Nashville next to the railroad. Let me say that I enjoyed the experience and got quite a lot out of it - it being my experience that one gets from such things depends a lot on what one brings to them. It helped being in the company of a friend who just recently (relatively speaking) discovered her own inner darkness, by way of surviving trauma, and became much richer and deeper for it. Once inner darkness is discovered, it either becomes a cancer and eventually kills you, or if properly cultivated (and with the necessary aptitude, luck and training) can become the inner shining Black Diamond of which I've spoken previously. In my friend, the dark shines brightly, though manifesting through layers of much lighter brightness. I can't really speak to the other people who attended the event; I'm sure some of them are persons of some realization and others are not, as occurs in any unregulated gathering.

It was nice, genuinely, to have something to do on New Year's Eve, a holiday I always hated (like the Fourth of July), even when I enjoyed drinking, a lot - it's amateur night for first-time drunk drivers and an excuse for every childish pashu to unleash his inner Dennis the Menace, loudly and late. In recent years I've fled the city, when I could, to avoid the idiotic merrymaking. It was somehow satisfying that I spent this one a scant ten blocks from the Riverfront, where Lynryd Skynyrd was playing and had promised to delight the audience with a fifteen-minute version of "Free Bird" at midnight (and I'm not making this up!). I've been listening to a lot of Indian music the last year or two, mostly Ravi Shankar, so I enjoyed the music, although a bit disappointed that it consisted of Western arrangements of Indian chants and hymns, including some Vedic, in Western scales and with guitars in standard tuning. Gotta love the tabla though! The first group to perform was in fact delightful, with some very nice harmonies. The second though - and I know I'm projecting - seemed to me to be a nice picture of what's wrong with American yoga, although the lead singer was a dyed blonde who lives in India. To wit:

I started doing Yoga in 2000, mostly because, as I completed the ascendant arc of a cycle after some dissipation and a car wreck with injuries, I wanted to stretch my hamstrings. Like a lot of us who grew up with gym class and forced group sports as exercise models, especially the males, I'd never gotten into the habit of adequate stretching and my body core strength wasn't adequate to the strength of my limbs, so I was in a typical imbalance. The Yoga I was doing began at the YMCA, the object of much vitriol in prior early blogs, and toward which my feelings have not altered, though I still go, for the same reasons. It was purely what the West calls Hatha Yoga - yoga of the body only. As evolved, it's good for what it is, stretching and strengthening, and a good counter to jogging, weight-lifting, football, whatever. Interestingly enough, I discovered recently that the term 'hatha', from Sanskrit, has to do with violence, force, a striking, or a man stricken with despair - which gives us a faint echo of where the practice originated, in the ascetic schools of Hinduism. In fact, the Y, twelve years ago when I took my first Yoga class, had only recently allowed the classes to be called Yoga - seeing it, accurately, as the intrusion of a foreign religious practice into their smug corporate Christianity. Those preachers are right, you know - Yoga practitioners are acting against Christianity, and more power to them in that regard - they would have been burned as heretics in earlier times. Although the Yoga found today in every class retains almost exclusively the physical, and it is indeed when American Yoga meander into ersatz Hindu spirituality that it manifests the most syrupy, revolting, 'puppies and kittens' aspect of that vast philosophy. Of course so do some authentic Hindu's. I guess the bottom line is that the Sunflower School of divinity is not to my taste, nor do I find it likely to be helpful except maybe for pre-school girls.

Having researched 'kirtan' just a bit, it is a practice of chanting, call-and-response style, adopted from the Hindu - notably in Vaishnava schools - and in some Buddhism. Notably, I don't see any indication of it in Shaivism, though Hindus are a very large and diverse lot, and I'm sure it's in there somewhere. What I found profoundly comical was the evocation of Kali and Durga in musical stylings that led the performers into medleys with classic rock tunes (folk versions of course) and even 'Imagine', that most irreligious and misunderstood of all the hit masterpieces of our modern age. I may see a bit of Goth in Siva and even a little Tiny Tim, but almost no Peter, Paul and Mary. The lead singer of the second performance apparently has an Indian husband and fosters seventeen Indian children. I'll leave that one lie, and my opinion that mass charity to populations like that of modern India makes a bad problem worse, for another time.

Suffice it to say that by the end of the evening, during a fifteen-minute meditation that was unfortunately interrupted every few minutes by the meanderings of the 'onstage' muse, I was channeling great currents of dark energy and flame up through the earth into the basement study, blasting the event with masses of fire and skulls, where Kali danced in delight. 'Fresh meat!' she cried.

To tell the truth, I find that the almost all of the Americans I know - hell, almost all of the people I know - have grown up and been irrevocably formed by modern deteriorated (yes, even of that vile seed!) Christianity and its sectarian manifestations - Capitalism, Consumerism, Marxism, Scientism and most especially, Humanism - in such a way as to lack understanding of the power, truth and value of Darkness. This is so incredibly stupid in the Kali Yuga that I cannot, in the face of such ignorance and profound unawareness, hold any hope for the human species in its present form. In the evolutionary sense, if any life on earth is possible after the human cataclysm, I can only hope that it diverges in some way so intense as to avoid the present murk. For myself, I find that the horizontal aspect of existence is a lost cause, and only in a vertical sense -by "moving" "above" the realm of space/time with one's awareness, does the possibilty of meaningful life manifest.

Having said all this, I'm planning on doing a Yoga class tomorrow - it's a great physical exercise which becomes a mental and even spiritual one as I, as I get closer to the end than the beginning of my lifespan, find my intent contrasting with my abilities, and it does really flush out the toxins! I had originally in this writing intended to point out the similarity of American Yoga to American Zen, in their assumption of the names of traditional practices and their assignment to them of forms which could only have originated in America. They are both Reconstructions; American Yoga is no more the Yoga of the Yoga Sutras nor of the authentic (and appropriate, for this devolved Age!) practice of Tantrism, nor is American Zen the Zen of Dogen - than the Society of Creative Anachronism is a faithful portrait of medieval Europe. I have various friends who are enactors of both Civil War and WWII battles; I find that their faith is more genuine, for being conscious imitators, actors and admirers, rather than deluded practitioners of modernized and degraded faiths.

By all means, people, do your Zen and do your Yoga. The Yoga is good for your body and the Zen is not. Learning to sit still, the very starting premise for these old traditions, is in itself a challenge for most of what passes for humankind these days. I was disgusted and amused that so many of the audience members at the kirtan could not even sit on the floor comfortably without props for any length of time - and the ability to sit without the products of manufacture would seem to me to be a minimum requirement to call oneself even a human-like animal! But I digress.

I wish to indicate no ill will toward those led down the paths of Zen and Yoga - I myself have been both and survived. And please, if you are a practitioner of either of these paths who think that you have discovered within them the elements I find missing, please let me know where and when! I would lvoe to see their hidden mysteries manifest in these times. I merely find itself that within those paths, as they are, there is such misunderstanding, such good-natured and altruistic ignorance, that only those who are both endowed and fortunate can get through them to what lies behind. Seek the darkness, friend.

Rudra - Vedic Metal

2012-01-05T05:07:00.006-06:00

Soon after I started this blog in 2005, I started posting videos by bands that I thought were seminal, or life-changing, at least for me. That hasn't been done so much these days, because of the ease of sharing music and video on the social networking sites, though I still get lots of hits on those pages. But given my current direction, here's a band that I find not only inspiring and motivating, but that actually helps me concentrate my psychic energies in ways that I find intuitive and correct. Therefore, meet Rudra - a Vedic metal band from Singapore!

I wish I knew more about this band - if you do, drop me a line! I do know they've been around since 1992 or so, have released six albums, and have just finished a world tour. I only own and have listened extensively to their latest album, Brahmavidya: Immortal I, which was released last year. That will change.

I don't know if there are any other Vedic metal bands. I'm not normally a big metal fan, or haven't been - a lot of it leaves me cold. But the energetic black metal these guys play, blended with bits of Carnatic music, which I love, and rich with Sanskrit, not nearly all of which I have translated or even identified yet, is a perfect soundtrack for the wealth I get from the Vedas. I was usually disappointed with the lyrical content of the Nordic metal bands some of my Asatru friends like; a lot of their presentation seemed cartoonish. But these guys have good true content, true not only to the Vedic philosophies as I understand them, but to later, but still strong, aspects of the Hindu metaphysic - especially the warrior mentality, the karma yoga of the Bhagavad Gita. Nothing says Kurukshetra like - well, Kurukshetra!

Witness these lyrics from "Harrowing Carrions of Syllogism" on the above-mentioned album:

Mind creates a subjective notional world
Limited by knowledge we see what we want to see
The mind can't see beyond its thought constructs
The lack of a valid pramana leads to self-deception
Destroy your world by seeing yourself as the essence of the universe

Like the eye which can't see itself, the I can't see the inner I
Without shabda, you can't know your Self
Without shruti, you can't see your Self
Manobuddhyahankaracittani naham
Na ca vyomabhumir na tejo na vayu
Cidanandarupa shivoham shivoham*

Destroy your world by seeing yourself as the essence of the universe
Like clay in the pot, see yourself as the essence of the universe
Vain reasoning is a bottomless pit
Inflates the non-self with conceit

Shabda alone leads the mind beyond the limit of thoughts
To the self which is beyond logic and reason
Aham nirvikalpo nirakararupa
Vibhutvacca sarvatra sarvendriyanam
Na casangato naiva na muktirna bandha
Cidanandarupa shivoham shivoham*

[*Nirvana Shatkam]

(with thanks to DarkLyrics.com)

I present to you two excellent videos; the top one is "Hymns from the Blazing Chariot" from Rudra's 2009 album Brahmavidya: Transcendental I, and the one below is "Now Therefore" from the album Brahmavidya: Immortal I (and they play a lot better if you double-click and play them on YouTube). The first is a great depiction of the setting of the Gita, wherein Krishna tells of Arjuna of the karma marga - the path of action without attachment to results. Enjoy! The hippie myths of flowery Hinduism are destroyed on the Field of the Kuruks.

Black Sun Rise

2012-01-04T07:28:00.001-06:00

Sorry for the long silence, again. I've been meditating, studying, researching... and working.

I've been continuing my study of Sanskrit (slow but satisfying), and pursuing the essence of the symbols, people and forces that intrigue me, that pull me directly by the gut. I've been fascinated by the languages, myths, and truths of India, and of the forces other than human that mold and constitute our "world". I find that whereas once I read book and studied systems of training and knowledge to find some answer, some solution, now I am looking for language to express what I have seen and what I know to be true. Many of the most powerful symbols known to man have been misused, denigrated, and then ban. Witness the swastika, one of man's oldest solar designations, known as widely as the American Indians and still found in Hinduism and Buddhism, and whose powerful presence drew the intuitive knowledge of the turn-of-the-last century Germanic mystics like Guido von List and Karl Maria Villegut. These men had their spiritual fingers on a deep arising of the true spirit of many peoples, behind and Above many peoples, if they never succeeded in devising the complete systems they envisioned (yet, read aloud the powerful hymns, in mixed German and language unknown, in Willegut's writings, and they will move your "soul", if you have one). The swastika, taken as a symbol for peace by many including the British military early in the 20th century, became in Hitler's Reich a symbol for German nationalism, which it was never meant to be - and then after Germany's defeat, under the aegis of the Allies and their hidden masters, it became reviled as a symbol of evil, which is never was, never is....

But the symbol which draws me more, and which I wear every day, is the Black Sun. The Black Sun is a pattern, a design which drew me from the first sight and mention of it, in whatever obsure text. Its true origin is unknown, obscured by time and man; the best known current incarnation of it was on the embedded on the floor of the Wewelsburg castle which was the headquarters of Himmler's SS (and Himmler was among other things a student of the Germanic teachers, despite where his openness to "lower" powers led him, apparently). Seeking the emblem's sources, one is led to theories of a physical dead sun which is or was part of our solar system, or a sun inside the earth in unlikely meanderings... or perhaps the concept of a black hole, which could not be voiced in the astronomy of earlier times. The design itself seems to be a twelve reversals of the Sig or Sowilo Rune, itself a solar symbol in the Armanic and Older Futharks. But whatever its origin, it is a powerful symbol of a presence abiding in me and in the universe.

When I was young and quite dedicated, in a fairly unconscious way, to my current explorations, I find myself, having abandoned my first (pre-Zen) form of Buddhist practice, drawn to a moving meditation based on action - years before encountering the Bhagavad Gita, or the teachings of Gudo Nishijima of Zen as action. As my body became more purified (a state I wish I could regain, in my middle age!) I envisioned in the core of my Self a Black Diamond - and even voiced to myself, if no one else, the understanding that was I was practicing was the Black Diamond Sutra, which had no words, but consisted of the constant polishing of a that gem within myself, which shone with a nocturnal luminance. More like a black light, if you want an image, in the shape of a diamond, yet hard.

The black diamond was lost to me for a time, but resurrected in my last movements. After leaving formal Zen, I took up for a bit over a year, the Nine Doors meditation formulated by Edred Thorsson as part of the Rune Gild teachings. Those teachings, which appear to borrow in large part from Franz Bardon's excellent (if badly translated) works, brought a depth of visualization, of learning to perceive, inculcate and channel flow of energy ever-present but invisible to waking eyes, to my meditation process, already formatted by my years of Zen practice. And the Black Diamond began to re-emerge, and softened now, opened. Thus I perceived the Black Sun, which I was able to recognize when I read of it and saw its emblems.

And yet, in my search for language, for concept accessible to opened human minds, I could find little. Luckily I encountered a Tantric exercise described by Julius Evola in The Yoga of Power, a book which contains many other delights and which still draws me on. He describes therein a nocturnal sun, which rotates unseen in our world, though not the material one as we know it. First, let me mention another teaching of Tantra which I have also encountered elsewhere; the concept that man, when open to them, has four primary states of awareness, usually described as the waking state, the dream state, and the state of deep sleep - and a state called turiya, of a higher awareness that encompasses the crowns the others. this system never made a lot of sense to me. The waking state was obvious, and it was also clear that in the dream state and especially in deep sleep, repairs were done by autonomous and autonomic processes in my body and mind. But how could the muddled images of the dream be a higher awareness, let alone the delta-wave state of deep sleep? It seemed to me that as one moves through these states, consciousness itself was degrading, not purifying. Although of course I have long been aware that dreams can hold much significance, outside the neurotic drivel of the Freudians and most analysis. I should add that sleep has not come easily for me for a long time, and contrary to what one is taught of sleep's cycles, I normally seem to be dreaming every time I awake, although most often the contents of the dream are soon lost if I don't make an effort to retain them (and sometimes when I do).

The Tantric practice which Evola describes consist of envisioning, as one is drifting off - in the stage between wakefulness and sleep - a nocturnal sun, which arises in the east and parallels the course of the daytime Sun, while it is down. Envision this, devote oneself to its observation, and form the intent to maintain awareness of it while sleeping. When waking in the morning, observe this sun again, and form the intent to maintain awareness of it during the day, while it is invisible (on the other side of the "earth") but still present. The teaching of this? The dream state and the state of deep sleep are state of lowered consciousness for normal man, whose filtered perceptions are not capable of handing the higher states to which these states are doorways. By maintaining awareness of the nocturnal sun - which I imagine as white disk, like a purified moon, though quite distinct and separate from that lesser entity - one is able to open the doors between the higher states and the residual consciousness during sleep.

What I did immediately become aware of (hang me for a dangling participle!) was that I slept deeply, for almost twelve hours, on the first night of attempting this practice. And that the nocturnal sun became clear to me, and can be maintained during the day. Surely the linking of this to the Black Sun, the teaching of which are so elusive, are clear now. And now... the resonance of the Black Sun within to the bright but invisible sun without? That is the synthesis I'm working on now.

But find your symbols where you may - I don't know if my symbols are yours, or ever could be, though some appear to be universal, across cultures to the initiate - but rest assured that there are forces in this universe much more powerful than the mind of man, which threatens to destroy all. The religion of the worship of man is the "sin" of our Age of Iron, our Kali Yuga, which though it leads to eventual rebirth of the Universe (but not in the chronological sense!) is going to be anything but pleasant for those who cling to the Earth's "surface". And is my job, our job, whoever "we" are, to persist, to know, to live in or move from...?

Black Sun Rise, indeed!

Cycles and Hope

2011-11-26T05:10:00.003-06:00

Early this month, I atended the ninth (non-annual Moot) of the Rune Gild, at which that organization's "Yrmin-Drighten" (think "Supreme Leader") and founder Edred Thorsson asserted that the organization was completing a cycle at nine, and beginning anew. Though not quite sure what the cycle had to do with that organization (other than the number of the Moot, which are held seeming arbitrarily) since it is about 31 years old. I was intrigued because I've always thought of human life, at least, as appearing in cycles of seven. Of course, I wasn't thinking; the cycles of nine come from Astrology cum Numerology, and the idea is based not only on Neo-Platonic number theory but on the applied Gematria of the Kabbalah. In human life, those cycles are usually conceived as nine-year cycles. Which impelled me to further research when I realized that I, just completing this month, my sixth nine-year cycle.

And boy, does my cycle seem to have just ended! A cycle which began in destruction and desperation, bottoming out in 2003 with the death of my mother and the temporary loss of my liberty, during which I recreated myself through association with organizations. In 2004, I began sitting with the Nashville Zen Center, as every long-time reader of this blog knows. In 2006, frustrated with the apparent illegitimacy of that organization as it was, I myself became associated with the Atlanta Soto Zen Center, with its founding Abbott, Michael Elliston. Eventually my association with and promotion of the ASZC within the NZC led to the formal association of the two, and the adoption of a rigid Soto Zen protocol within the NZC that drove away many of its previous adherents. I myself opposed the formal association of the two, especially as it was occurring at a time at which I, ironically due to the better realizations of my own zazen (my own little 'enlightenment'), as well as disillusionment with what I perceived as personal meddling by the ASZC Abbott) was drawing away from the universalist, anatman-based philosophy of Zen. As you loyal readers also know, I was being drawn through my own perception of personal permanence and Jungian embededness, to the lore of Germania and the Asatru Folk Alliance, as well as my own local kindred. Eventually, not satisfied with the "right hand path" religiousness of most of the Asatruar, I sought back in the other direction, and joined the Rune Gild, the esoteric organization founded in 1982 by Edred Thorsson, Germanic scholar and author of Futhark and most of the materials on which the Gild is based.

The NZC survived my departure, due mostly to the continuing faithfulness of one of my best friends who had indeed supported by Zen practice most heartily throughout my tenure, and one of my newer best friends. But its future has by the departure from formal practice of the former, and by the rejection of the mess in Atlanta by the latter, been put on shaky ground. The ASZC itself has been split between a new Sangha and a New Order put by the Abbott on the stricter ground of discipleship to himself. Meanwhile, my local Asatru kindred has been almost inactive. Leaving me a man without active Association for the first time since 2004, with the exception of the Rune Gild. At events occurring shortly before and during the World Moot, which I am sworn not to divulge and would not anyway from loyalty to friends, the Gild itself has gone dark from the web and has undergone other changes which make my connection to it tenuous.

Meanwhile, in my personal life, my own cycles and those of the person whom I will always consider to be the love of my life, have interacted badly enough (thanks in a large part to my own end-of-cyclic apparent decimation) that it is clear, our relationship as it stood is at an end. We are connected in eternity (which does not mean a very long time!) and she remains my most supportive friend. That, in combination with my own unemployment since the first of August and a rapidly fizzling bank account, lead me to believe that without rebirth there can be no life at all.

So here I am, clearly having just concluded one cycle and at the beginning of a new one. In numeric terms, I move from my sixth to my seventh. In the major arcana of the Tarot, the change of cycles is from VI, The Lovers, to VII, The Chariot - which latter in itself indicates new beginnings. That double restart can't hurt me! at this point. In the Kabbalah, the movement is from Tipareth (the Sun) and Netzach, which perhaps ironically, is ruled by Venus and speaks of love in the human sense. The path between Tipareth and Netzach is Peh, the path of war, whose element is iron, whose animal is the wolf, and whose card is XVI, The Tower, a card of chaos. Which is, believe me, where I stand.

When I spoke to my friend last night, she told me that she has no expectations and no hope; that she just goes on one step at a time and deals with things as she perceives them to me. After meditation, my response to her is that without hope I never would have made it through last night. Hope springs eternal, as they say, and when it stops springing eternally, the spring is dead. Yet hope is one of those things that I regained when I began my own perception of the Eternal, not based on any creed. I believe that each one of us is in this incarnation for a reason, and will be back "again" (and I refuse the spiral mindfuck of 'what comes back' that leaves to religious absurdities. I do.) I believe that the adherence I need to make to my own purpose of life is to live it my own principles, without giving in to the pressures of society and my friends to follow various paths or to drink the Kool-Aid of one more single organization.

Currently, life seems to be a race between the destruction of either Western Civilization, or the World Itself, or my own. However, in a Vaishnavistic cycle of ten, the ninth incarnation of Vishnu was the Buddha, who came to mislead the world with false teachings, to purify the seed by drawing away the misled. The tenth incarnation is Kalki, who comes with a sword on a white horse, to put an end to the present age, so that the world can begin anew and apure. Kalki comes, children.

Death and the Living

2011-10-30T08:37:00.002-05:00

In the past few months, three untimely deaths have occurred in proximity to me; that is, deaths not of people to whom I was personally all that close, but who were dear to people whom I consider close. All of these deaths were premature, seemingly senseless. Two of the deceased I had never met, and the other had never revealed much of himself to me. In this strangest of times, I'm trying to decipher this message.

Death is no stranger. Probably the hardest thing I've gone through in this life was the death of my mother, eight and a half years ago. But hard as that was, and though I had the usual regrets, flogging myself over perceived lost opportunities and unmet obligations, she was eighty, and the last expression of her final illness was brief. There's more to come, and nothing unusual in that; some of the people I care most about remaining in this world, are in their eighties, including my father.

But 2011 has been a strange year, full of illness, disaster and now unseemly death. In short sequence, one of my friends lost a 23-year-old daughter who'd just begun to manifest heart problems. Then the 47-year-old husband of one of my closest relatives died in a few months of pancreatic cancer. Then, just last week, the infant grandson of a good friend died suddenly, SIDS. None of these deaths could have been foreseen at the beginning of this year; one of the deceased had barely been conceived. The feelings of the aggrieved are not unimaginable to me, but I know I have not had them.

It is unavoidable that I quest for meaning in all this - that I look for a message. Strange that in these last few months, I feel that I do know what happens after death. Not from any teachings, but from experience. I know that my mother was around for a while after her death, then she moved on from here. I'm not the only one who's had that experience. I feel that she moved into me, in part; there are parts of me that weren't there before she died. And also that she moved on into the world, into others. Ultimately, to move on and do what she needed to do next.

I do feel strongly that we survive our deaths in this world. It seems that we come here to do what we have to do. And we come back, eventually, to do what we need to do next; that these transitions happen in eternity, not in time, and my next manifestation may be in the past of "this" world, or in another. I do not feel the Buddhist doctrine of anatman - that there is no individual self. I feel strongly that there is. Nor do I really believe in moksha, release. I share the belief of my Germanic ancestors that life is a good thing, though hard at times - and that we come back to be in this world, without the need to escape it.

Not that we're not more than our little selves, you understand. That's a discussion for another time.

Nor is this the place to discuss the way we as a species value life so wrongly - that so many of us value its quantity over its quality. That we extend the lives of our old ones into misery, that we keep alive so many who are called to die, beyond their time, and in defiance of their well-being and our own. That we have through our misguided worship of human life in the abstract, filled our world (as of tomorrow!) with seven billion, in a planet that can at best support a few hundred million once the petroleum bubble of industrial civilization is burst - soon, now. That we have in our greed and ignorance condemned billions to die, not naturally, but of starvation, famine, and war.

No, I'm just left contemplating the death of those who died, seemingly for no reason - though there was a reason, I think they knew it before they came and have realized it now. Only to us, struggling to make sense of our own lives, do their deaths seem senseless.

But there is a reason, and a meaning, for us, too. If life was eternal - if we lived as our present selves, endlessly - it would cease to have meaning. Ask Lazarus Long. Death is the darkness, the shadow that enable us to see the shapes of life. Without it, life would have no definition. We would be unable to perceive our limits. The truth is, we can't right all of our wrongs (shouldn't that word really be 'wright', as in 'wheelwright'?). We don't have time to make all the changes we would need to make, to be perfect.
Without the limitation of death, we couldn't see. Anything.

So perhaps the death of others help us to see the shapes of our own lives. And not to despair of them. The deaths of others give our lives meaning - a chance to see the shape of things before our own deaths terminate our own ability to see, to change.

Not that this makes it any easier to lose a loved one. But our lives are not supposed to be easy, even if we tell ourselves that sometimes. And in the coming dark time, few of them will be, no matter how well or how poorly we think we've prepared for our illusory futures.

Shape the future in the present, with your own hands. Shape yourselves. In some sense, you've chosen the part you now play. Develop and deepen that character. You are the universe and also yourself. How would you like to live, today?

Beyond Meditation

2011-10-23T08:37:00.005-05:00

(An interim statement).

Some of you will think this post unspeakably arrogant. Some of you will think that I am merely self-deluded. There is no objective way for me to counter that you are not correct. But it's a subject that is incomprehensible to some, perhaps obvious to others - the moving beyond meditation.

To most of us who are or were regular meditators, the idea that meditation may or may not at some point in our lives become unnecessary or even inadvisable, is not one that is commonly held nor encouraged - certainly not by those whose livelihood, whose social position or even self-esteem is supported by the meditation enterprise. The majority of us come to it in the first place at a point in our lives where life without meditation, more or less what Socrates called the unexamined life, is either not worth living, or feels incomplete. Whereas Socrates was probably referring more to a kind of philosophical self-examination, the meditation which many of us have sought comes from both Eastern and Western traditions which encourage a kind of transcendence of the merely rational.

The traditional meditations - assuming we have a common enough understanding of that word to use it - of the West mostly died out or were killed off long before our era. The Druids and the shamans of Western Europe were annihilated by the demons from the desert in the form of the Christian Church by the end of the first millenium A.D., though they are rumored to have survived in pockets and in various schools of lore. The Church taught blind obedience to authority, and suppressed the pockets of revitalized meditative, Gnostic practices are they re-arose both from the traditions and from the natural inclinations of man who wanted something more than slavery.

There could be a lot of discussion of the relationship between meditation and prayer; at time the two merge, become the same. But that's a topic for another time, a totally internal navigation and distinction between inner and outer direction, a definition of greater subtlety than may initially appear, which is either best reserved for another time and space or left to the individual altogether.

While admitting the possibility of isolated and individual exceptions, sociologically speaking, meditation "returned" to America and the West by way of the East; beginning in the nineteenth century, for the most part, the teachings of the East, notably India, and to some extent the Orient, returned to the a West which was sufficiently "liberated" from the grasp of the Church (although arguably - as I will argue - subject to other forces just as mind-altering or oppressive or both) to consider non-Christian teachings, and to adopt them on a large scale. As a whole new world of prosperity and seemingly limitless possibility opened after World War II, particularly in the US, Eastern teachings flourished - from the "Zen" of the Beat Generation (check Kerouac's Some of the Dharma if you want to see how far off-track from "real" Zen this really was) to the more authentic but somewhat watered teaching of the Maharishi Mahesh Yogi (see Transcendental Meditation). America was a gullible wonderland for false teachers who were able to slip in with the more credible ones, into a culture which had no antibodies, no filters for these charlatans). Even in the case of good teachers with good intentions (see Sunryu Suzuki and read Shoes Outside the Door), the traditional teachings fell into a cultural vacuum and became lost, distorted or perverted when the original teacher was gone.

This is not the place for a debunking of American Zen - which I maintain is to some extent a theatrical production, and is definitely as much of a reconstruction of medieval Japanese practices as Asatru is of ancient Nordic or Germanic ones. Modern American Zen, regardless of its relation to the original, culturally embedded teaching of Dogen, has a lot to offer. Like any other institution, those who rely on it for their identity or sustenance - the Priest class or its lay equivalent - pose a separate issue. Those who of necessity seem personal gain, even in the most non-materialistic sense, in issues so central to the self-realization of practitioners, always pose a danger, albeit sometimes unconsciously. Nevertheless, I have no doubt that direct and unfiltered meditation upon the "self" and ultimately through the "self" is a necessary step in liberation from what William Burroughs calls Control.

I stopped doing zazen meditation in the formal sense a bit over a year ago, several years ago after the activity in which I was engaged, on a subjective level, had become something entirely different anyway. Meanwhile over the last few years I had become engaged in Asatru, largely as a result of realizations I had during zazen. I hesitate to dwell too much on my subjective experience, both because of its intensely personal nature (which leads to and constitutes a kind of vulnerability) and because of its necessary uniqueness; I would and should not expect anyone else to duplicate my experience. Nonetheless, it has become clear to me on a level of intuitive perception that others have had experiences which are similar in type and direction, if not in content.

To put it briefly and in the context of a metaphor I have used often: after long periods of zazen (and again, this is for me) at some point the self - the consciously and socially formed sense of self, of identity, what Ramana Maharshi calls the I-thought, not just drops off, but breaks up. I tend to visualize it in reconstruction as the self exploding into a mass of ball bearings which go bouncing across the concrete floor of sheer being/nothingess. That is when one, or at least I, perceive(d) emptiness. But upon sticking with that - with staring into Emptiness, I came "in time" (or outside of it) to see another self, which I saw as a true self, emerging from behind the curtain.

One could certainly argue - and the argument has been made to me, rest assured - that the new Self I saw is false, and there will be a series of others behind him. The Zen metaphor is of an onion, which is pealed repeatedly until at the center is, again, nothing. Perhaps. Yet I am quite sure that the second self, I saw, is a true self which exists at a totally different level that the one I started with. I am someone, after all. Some distinct. No concept has been more harmful to us, especially to children as reared by this society (or fertilized and left to grow randomly like weeds, more like) than the idea : You can be anything! Nothing could be further from the truth. For the most part, you are what you are, and that is that, and much of succeeding in this life comes from accepting that fact.

Anyway - I am someone! I have genetic traits! And more than that, I have ideas and perceptions that are distinctly mine. Things I've always known. Things I was never taught but immediately perceived as true. Things that may be true for me, but not for you. Ways in which I am much more like my family and those more like me, than others). And I live in a world that tells me that that the ways in which I am unique or different, are wrong and unacceptable. But that is just one more circumstance of the life, existence and current manifestation with which I have to deal.

My intuition tells me that I am more than just this one mortal life, on earth. It has nothing to do with anyone's spiritual teachings - it is what I directly perceive, and more, know. What or who exactly that is - is to be examined further.

But back to meditation. By the time I left Zen, I was already quite involved in Asatru. I think that to the extent my culture and my genetic pool's cultural heritage has survived, it is there - this despite the fact that modern Asatru is of necessity a reconstruction, and the understanding of that heritage should be supplemented by the understanding of parallel developments (notably both paganized Christianity, which is the basis of Western civilization as we know it, and Hinduism, which represents the flowering of an unrepressed Indo-European heritage which is yet blended with another, authentically Eastern tradition). Not that I am not fascinated by other traditions. But the proselytizing, Universalist nature of the "demon from the desert" religions (and the Universalist though less messianic tradition of Buddhism) misleads us from the perception that most of the world's religions are True for their own people. All the indigenous, ancestral ones, anyway. And pretty much useless for converts.

Asatru is for the most part a right-hand path. A social religion, like most of Christianity. To get at its essence, at one's own essence, for those so inclined, it is necessary to go inner, inside, via the left hand - to accept one's one uniqueness and existence as more than a social entity - to approach god(s) directly. There are such paths available; I am a member of an organization called the Rune Gild, but there are teachings, paths to follow, made available to all. Such as Edred Thorsson's Nine Doors of Midgard. The Nine Doors is.. well, more than I can say in this space which I am making a vain attempt to limit. It involves a lot of Rune work on a lot of different levels, and a lot of meditation. In accordance with its suggestions, when I took up its program in June, 2010 - pretty much simultaneously with my last participation in organized Zen - I abandoned any practices outside of its tradition, which is the pre-Christian Western one. I think I accomplished a lot. I learned a lot. I am not through with it, yet.

Yet for the last couple of months, I find myself not wanting to do formal, seated meditation in any tradition. When I first started meditating, years ago, it was often hard to make myself go and do it, because it was hard. Now, it's not that - it just seems hollow. Shallow. Nothing seems different when I "meditate" than when I don't. It's as if the process worked its way into my consciousness until the states were no longer differentiated. I could speak more about this, but I won't, because most of you have no idea what I'm talking about, or have already decided that I'm delusional. That's ok.

I know people who are seeming addicted to meditation. Something is wrong with their day if they haven't done it. I remember that. And probably it's a necessary thing; it seems to me from my experience that it is necessary, to get a "benefit" (which Zen practitioners in particular deny seeking, so words fail) to do it regularly for some time - and to do it A LOT at certain times. It took me the experience of long periods of meditation, day after day, to have the experience described above.

I do know of long-time Zen practitioners, teachers, who have after many years and careers in meditation, have abandoned it. And not in exasperation, either. I only did it for a few years and can't compare myself to those people; I know only my own experience, but I know it well. And I won't say that I'll never meditate again; I undoubtedly will. As life demands; I have no doubt that the universe will call for such a thing. I'm just saying that right now, I don't feel the need to do it. I'm very glad I did what I did. And someday maybe I'll do it again.

Please don't be a slave to enlightenment. Unless you want to be. But like everything, it can be transcended, and then encountered again and again, as the wheel turns.

Little Boxes on the Highway

2011-10-20T07:48:00.004-05:00

Perhaps my main reason for resuming these Diaries was to get some personal truths out of my head, get them expressed. By that I mean that, in contrast to those ideas that come and go, and change - as did my attitudes toward "politics" and "spiritual practice" during the course of the first incarnation of this blog - there are some ideas that remain constant. These I think are worth examining and expressing, because they have been around and reaffirmed enough in my consciousness as to actually express part of my "self".

One of the most resolute of these "fixed ideas" came to me as I was driving back to Nashville from Manchester last Sunday. I was on I-24, which is not the worst interstate in the world, but a typical melange of passenger cars, work vehicles, 18-wheelers, motorcycles, horse trailers, RV's, and whatever else might be out on a sunny Sunday afternoon. All that would be missing to call this Chaos would be to move it to Thailand and throw in a few pigs and chickens.

As I was alternatively passing and being passed in my Toyota Corolla by all these random entities, it occurred to me, as it occasionally does, that should one of the larger victims make a wrong move, or should I, I would be immediately annihilated, or mangled so badly I'd wish that I had been. As defensive driving courses (I'm sure) would teach you, right or wrong has no meaning in a crash. It's all down to vectors and force, the sheer laws of physics. Once the Mac truck hits a motorcycle, all the human, philosophical, spiritual, intellectual elements are gone - merely unevenly sized pool balls on a break.

When considering the origins of this mess, all sorts of philosophical, legal, historical and legal factors come into account. The selection of vehicles on the highway is the spawn of both the auto and transportation industries, and separate entities. But before we get into all that, what's the solution? It's not the reason behind the problem that matters so much as the solution.

The answer that comes to me, repeatedly, after thirty years or so of considering this mess, is to (1)remove the trucks from the highway, and (2) to mandate that everyone on it drive a uniform vehicle.

The early reactions to my hint about this blog entry, in the previous one, suggests that the readers thought I was going to be advocating mass transit. Which I am, where possible. Having lived in San Francisco with its amazing system(s), to return to Nashville into standardized American chaos, where each person drives his own 2,000-lb monster to work each day, was a re-entry shock (OK, it was as bad in Albuquerque - I'm abbreviating). OK we now have HOV lanes and the cars are a bit smaller, the fuel a bit closer to its true cost. But still..

But mass transit is not the total solution for passenger travel in all but the most concentrated parts of the US population. Although I believe that a corollary measure - a mandatory national rail system for freight - is essential. There's no way that a load of bricks or shit or computers moving from Atlanta to Nashville, or wherever, needs to be driven in a series of trucks. The trucks really only need to come into play once the cargo reaches the urban center or region of its destination. What to do with it, once it gets there, to keep these killer behemoths (the 18-wheelers) off the road during rush hour, is to do just that - to regulate which roads, and when the trucks can function for urban delivery. There is no reason I should need to compete with them at 8 a.m. at lunch or at 5. Or on certain roads, at all.

While the country is searching for ways to revitalize the job market (and THAT is a topic I can't even touch in this entry), how about instead of even more road work, build a national rail system? Harken back to the days of the WPA. Or Europe after WWII (after the Americans and British destroyed all the old systems)? Yeah, there's that nasty funding issue - we'll get to that. But do it! And make them (the corporations) use it!

As to the cars - why does my Corolla need to run the risk of being rear-ended by a 1978 Pontiac Parisienne? Why does a Dodge Ram compete with a Prius? (I'm out of step with modern vehicle names, so forgive my last of creativity). It comes to consideration of our fucked-up concepts of both personal freedom and free enterprise.

Are you outraged that the government might tell you what kind of vehicle to buy? Really? Have you been so indoctrinated by the religion of Consumerism that you believe that Freedom consists of your freedom to choose between an iPhone and an Android one, or between shaving creams, or cars? To choose one consumer product over another (all while the PC media whispers and shouts to you which one is "really" best)? While the government erodes your most basic rights - your rights to go to school or church with whom you choose, to join clubs of your peers instead of the homogenized mass - your freedom of association? Your freedom even over your own body - and I'm not beating the abortion cow here, I'm talking about your right to choose to live or die in a hospice or nursing home or a prison, or to bleed to death in some oil or battlefield? And you wanna choose between your Hundai or your Ford? Are you that far gone?

All these issues are going to be addressed very extensively in the articles that follow. But let me suggest to you how to begin to clear your head. It takes a while. Step one: turn off the TV. Disconnect the cable. Or make sure you DVR everything and edit out the commercials. And don't watch the news. Search for your info in print or on the internet, find a "cooler" medium (and read your McLuhan if you don't know what I mean). Get the voices of the Masters out of your head. [Zen is all about shutting up your own voice. That comes later. First get the others out.]

Back on topic: "We" need to require that only one make and model of passenger vehicle be made. The contracts can be allocated out among existing manufacturers; I don't care. Everyone needs to drive an identical box. This ensures that when those inevitable collisions ensue, the result will be more like a game of bumper-cars that the uneven carnage we see now. Make them relatively slow and extremely crash-resistent. And make them all the same size and weight. You can have whatever color you want.

And if you want to drive a motorcycle, fine. Take off all the safety requirement for those. It's a perfectly valid, high-risk option of personal choice. And there will need to be some pick-ups, of comparable size and weight with the vehicles. Level the field.

Think about it. Try to stop expressing your personality through your possessions, and learn to express it through your person.

But how is all this to be done? True, the existing government never could or would put it into place, for a myriad of reasons. Personal interest and corporate ownership, mostly. As well as the objections of a bunch of well-meaning "individualists" who have been so co-opted by the Powers that Be that they don't know what "rights" or "freedom" mean anymore. Take the Tea Party. Or the current unconscious Puppet of Those Who Really Control, the OWS mob.

That's all I can say here. Intrinsic in solving this pragmatic, logistical problem is liberation of the individual from the yolk of tyranny, counterintuitive as that may sound. But we'll be working on that, in the next few entries. Or next lot of them, maybe. Maybe interrupted by some fun.

Stay with me, people...

Rebirth

2011-10-18T09:10:00.005-05:00

I have decided, more than two years after putting this blog into remission, to restart the Ratzaz Diaries. I was moved to do so for several reasons. First, a lot of the conflict I was experiencing between my earlier posts and the later ones - and between myself and most of the original readership of the Ratzaz Diaries - has dissipated. That is, I no longer see the problems that we as a people (either as an independent culture or ethnicity, or as a species) as definable in any way by the culturally delineated conflicts between false poles - i.e., between Democrats and Republicans (who both work for the same masters), between Christians and non-Christians, etc. So that for me the idea of choosing at this point between Obama and Mitt Romney for example (and what a wonderful choice!) is meaningless. When Democracy has failed in its entirety. And when the only options most people are able to consider are the ones presented them thru media that exists only for the purposes of propagandizing the populace and keeping them ignorant and distracted.

I was in the act of leaving Zen behind, for example, when I wrote my last few posts. It seems sometimes that a break with a belief system is a lot like ending a bad marriage; the energy needed in order to mobilize to make the necessary change generates as either a necessary or collateral effect (I haven't decided!) to make for a bit of bad blood, that hopefully dissipates over time as we heal and move on. That is how I feel about my Zen lineage and background at this time; it was helpful to me and helped form me, and I learned a lot from it. Indeed, the experiences I had in zazen are what enabled me to move past it. And there are a lot of worse things going on in this world that Zen Buddhism! and not a whole lot of better ones, in fact. So if you're one of my Zen friends and I pissed you off, I apologize. Sit on.

Another reason for resuming this blog is that the lack of it - though necessary for a while - has frustrated me a bit in maintaining at least the illusion that I am communicating with people of like mind, people whom whether they agree with me or not, are at least willing to think about the issues. Which people are not normal nor have ever been, in the context of my daily existence. I appreciate and need your feedback, or at least your listening.

I've noticed that I tend, when I don't restrict my mind from doing it, to construct solutions to perceived problems of society or of existence, on a somewhat massive scale. A lot of them involve "what would I do if I were king of the world" type thinking which I have no ability to implement (arguably, a damned good thing). So my construct may appear as sky-borne pies to you and pretty useless. Yet when I break down the motivations for my thinking, I discover that at the root of it are conclusions about the most basic human values that are at great variance with the norm. One of the first things I intend to write after this brief introduction, are how I would change the US highway, passenger transit and freight systems to accord with economy, good sense, ecology and safety. Which, as I study it, involves an analysis of our perverted notion of freedom, twisted by consumerism. We have championed totally illusory and meaningless choice - between an iPhone and an Android phone, or between a Miata and a Dodge Ram, and abandoned some of our most basic and usually assumed rights, like freedom of association, the ability to live and work with the people we choose; the manipulated loss of this basic right has destroyed our communities and destructured society so that we can become a mass of mindless slaves.

Another issue I wanted to address, on a limited basis, is the horror of the US prison system - that wastes money and destroys lives, and is brought into being, controlled by the lowest and most base aspects of man. [This post actually goes on from here, but apparently Google is malfunctioning and posted an unfinished draft, which ends in the middle of this sentence. It may be time to find a different host for this blog, since there is plenty of competition now... and why in the hell did it take hours for someone to bring this to my attention... GRRRrrrrr....].

More soon, I promise....

On Hiatus

2009-06-07T23:19:00.004-05:00

Yep, after thrashing it out and not reaching a resolution, the Ratzaz Diaries is on hiatus at this time. Due to intensive, extensive and accelerated personal renovation, I find that the things I want to express, at this time, are probably not something that most readers of this blog want to hear. And I really have no intention to just come on to intentionally offend people, at least not anymore.

A lot of you noticed a change in the contents of this blog, beginning last fall. I thank my last few years of earnest Zen practice for bringing me to a new perception of things. The things I perceive are not particulary Buddhist. So I have a real Catch 22 here. And I've learned that there really are evil entities out there, human ones, and you have to watch what you say.

Of course I do feel continue to feel the urge to express myself. At past times, in these Diaries, I was quite taken in by, well, the things we have all been taken in by (although not the demon of Grammar, apparently). I feel the urge to correct my mistakes, but it would seem simply mean to build an audience of people who think a certain way, and then tell them they are wrong, and that I was wrong. I may be developing a new blog, or perhaps even a full-blown website. Then again, I could change my mind tomorrow and post here.

I want to thank all of you who've been supportive or at least interactive for the last three and a half years on this blog. Continue to try to open your eyes. Don't believe anything anyone tells you, especially me. Find a path with heart.

Memorial Day

2009-05-25T05:46:00.007-05:00

Anyone who knows me knows that I'm anything but a pacifist. Peaceful, smiling compassion is not in my genetic makeup. I do believe strongly in fighting for a cause that you know is right.

As I imagine is true with most people, the ancestors I know best were soldiers. On my mother's side, her bloodline came to America in the form of a Hessian mercenary in the Revolutionary War, who came to fight for the British, but stayed on. Her genetic father was mustard-gassed fighting for the U.S. in WWI. My father and his four brothers fought for this country in WWII; all but one fought overseas, and all came back alive. I shall forever remain proud of all of those men, and for the women who supported them. Although the cause and the justification varied greatly in kind and in value, all were brave men and did what they had to do.

So some of you haven't been happy with some of my posts on the warfare of modern times. And it's true that my politics, as it were, have changed a good bit since I began these Diaries, notably in the last year. I think that I've become more reconciled to the inevitability of war; it is, at the bottom, an inextricable part of man's history, and ironically perhaps, of his civilization. As long as there has been Man, there has been War, and I believe there always will be. It's in his nature.

Yesterday morning I finished reading the American Heritage Picture History of the Civil War, with text by Bruce Catton. (If you follow that link, I think it's a different edition; mine was a two-volume set published in the sixties). If, in this age of digital propaganda, you want to read some real history, I suggest you go find a book - preferably an old book. The version of the Civil War that I hear is being taught in the public schools, where it is taught at all, is scarcely recognizable. Your children's teachers will tell you that the war was fought to free the slaves, which is was not.

You'll hear some old Southerners still arguing about who was right in that war; it's a bit late for that, and most sides had their reasons, neither was ready for war, and soldiers were misled a bit on both sides back then, too. Soldiers probably always have been. At least, in the day of my tribal ancestors in Europe, the chief who "declared" the war usually led his soldiers into battle. It's been a long time since the men who made wars had to fight them, or even since their sons had to fight, and that's the biggest shame of modern war.

But regardless of what you think of the screaming Secessionists in South Carolina who really made the rift final that led to the Civil War, there's no doubt that as to what the soldiers in the South were fighting for. Union soldiers were called up as an invasion force; the Southern soldiers were fighting to defend their homes. Under equipped and greatly outnumbered, and for the most part badly led, the Confederates won almost every battle but still lost the War.

It's really not at all hard for me to say where my sympathies lie here. I have two direct ancestors on my father's side, at least, who fought in the War; the father was killed after his own discharge, taking supplies to his soldier son's embattled and under supplied company near Chattanooga - on horseback from Warren County through the mountains. As a legal matter, I think the Southern states' right to secede from the Union was clear. And while the soldiers on each side fought bravely, how could anyone forget how Sherman re-invented Total War for the modern age with this march to the sea? At least Goebbels was honest about his motives!

I graduated high school in 1975, when the disaster of Vietnam was still fresh in everyone's minds and the military was not popular. Joining up was just not something you considered unless you couldn't go to college or couldn't get a job; and there were plenty of jobs. I fell into a lucky window of just a few years, of males who never even had to register for Selective Service. Would I have felt differently in a different time? Perhaps. I do know that the spectre of Vietnam was a dreaded one for almost everyone I knew. I would in know way denigrate the honor, courage or nobility of anyone who fought in that war; it's the people who sent you there, with whom I have a problem.

After Vietnam, bypassing Carter's and Reagan's minor excursions, by the next time the U.S. went to War, it had all gone to bad. Both Gulf Wars have been fought for money -- foreign money at that, lining the pockets of the warmongers. And there may be worse, more sinister forces than simply greed in play, I haven't yet decided. But assuredly, the soldiers who have been sent there (and yes, even the contractors who've had quite a few pieces of silver lain in their silk purses) have been used. Regardless of who or what you believe is ultimately responsible for these crimes against all of humanity, you need go no deeper than Dick Cheney and Haliburton to see who pulls the strings a few levels up from the soldiers. And be ashamed.

So please, on this Memorial Day, do honor and respect those who fought and died in years past for your liberty. Memorial Day was begun as a tribute to Union soldiers who died in the Civil War, and expanded after WWII as an occasion to honor all of our veterans, which is appropriate, I think. But don't stop at those who fought for the American flag. Honor your Confederate ancestors if you have them (and remember Jefferson Davis' birthday is June 3!). The photo at the top of this entry is from Carnton Plantation near Franklin, TN, site of a really stupid battle where lot of men died for nothing; such is the nature of War. That would be a good place to go today.

But, please: If your home, your family, your tribe are attacked, defend them with all your might. Fight for what you know is right. And learn to tell right from wrong. Know when you're being used. And when that happens, fight not the targets that the evil men chose for you, but the evil men themselves.

And now my favorite song about war, courtesy of the Dropkick Murphys...

Gods and Myths of Northern Europe

2009-05-15T06:13:00.004-05:00

I used to be a voracious reader of books; now, not so much. After staring all day at a computer screen, most of my free time is now used otherwise, with the result that I usually wind up with a backlog of books. And to tell the truth, most of what I've read lately has been disappointing. So much to my amazement, I picked up Gods and Myths of Northern Europe by H. R. Ellis Davidson where I'd left it months ago and discovered a nugget of scholarly and, may I say it, religious delight.

List most children growing up in America in the 60's and 70's, my access to the religious, mythological and folkloric history of the world came through (1) ridiculous Christian tales mixed with dogma, incoherently presented as "Truth"; and (2) tales of the Greek and Roman gods presented as silly stories, which were somehow supposed to enhance our understanding of culture and literature (which they may have, had we in fact been presented with any of that culture and literature). I may have heard of the Norse gods as a child, but I think I really discovered them in Thor comic books. And Thor was nowhere near my favorite; the rather pompous blond(!) superhero was nowhere as enticing as The Avengers or the X-Men for me.

All of which was really sad, but it just got worse. The next inkling I had that there were options to pursue, with regard to the the origins of our culture and mindset, were little pieces of Hindu art and lyrics from George Harrison albums, which led to the silly but fervent religiosity of the Hare Krishna's, and ultimately to my investigation of other religions from the East, and probably ultimately to Buddhism and Zen. So here I was, of German and English descent, being led in a big cultural circle which intentionally or not -- and more of that later, I promise! -- circumvented by true heritage, as a product of Northern Europe.

If you're of Northern European descent, the religion of your ancestors was that of the Celts or of the Germanic tribes. Although most of what we know of the "Norse" religions comes from the Eddas written at the end of the period of the northern gods' dominance -- when the stories had degenerated a bit -- they had their origins in the Europe of prehistory, in the same tribes which ultimately spread them to India where they (when integrated with the lost culture of the Dravidians) produced the Vedic period and all its children, including Hinduism and Buddhism. Which means that most of the gods of the Norse pantheon (which is usually presented by educators as sort of an alternate version of the Greeks and Roman pantheons, as opposed to an aggregate of the cults of separate deities, which it was) originated as German deities - Odin was prefigured by Wotan, a darker god.

If you are of Northern European descent, your lack of acquaintance with your true cultural heritage is a crime -- and I mean that literally. And there's no better way to catch up quickly than to find, if you can, and read a copy of Gods and Myths of Northern Europe. It looks like one of those little summaries of dry culture or myth that you read in high school or college because some instructor asks you to -- usually the quickest way to speed-ingest little summaries of some dry myth or the other. But those myths are dry because they're not presented properly, and because you don't have the background to understand them.

Davidson's book could easily be mistaken for one of those at first glance -- and in fact that's initially what I did. It starts out with a terse summary of the the Eddas, written by Snorri at the twilight of the myths themselves, and the little stories of the gods, without explanation or background are pretty much unintelligible and seem silly. So beware! because at this point I put the book down and only came back to it after reading some modern books on Asatru and wanted to know the scholarly versions of the myths. Whereupon this little book, after the first fifty pages blew me away!

Davidson not only presents the myths so that they make sense, she makes them relevant and real - and all this in a book published in 1965, before the rise of Asatru. For me, it brings it all home. Not only do I understand now more about the culture of my pre-Christian ancestors, but I see in them the roots of my own personality. The Nordic peoples were distrustful of authority but fiercely loyal to their kin and their own. I can relate not at all to the grovelling of the spawn of the desert religions, and can only respect and acknowledge the deep but foreign formalities of the Asian ones -- but the Nordic peoples, their stories and their yearnings, I feel in my heart.

My exploration of my true heritage has only just begun, but nothing in quite a while has so excited me. For the clarity to see, understand and accept what I feel in these things, I thank my Zen practice. And indeed, for these books - this little tome and the Icelandic sagas -- I thank one of my Zen friends, without whom I'd still be feeling that vague lack of cultural identity I've had til now. And now that my eyes are open, I have to know why this obvious connection to my past has been hidden from me, even denigrated.

Sometimes when one sees the truth, one doesn't like what is revealed. I'm often amazed at how popular "mystic" religion promote some sort of insight to be gained by practice or experience -- yet on the other hand tell you that they already know what the insight will be! What part of "unknown" don't they understand?

If you're not of Northern European descent, and you want true insight into a culture which is not your own, I still heartily recommend this book. Presented without paternalism, and indeed with a fascination which the excellent scholarship does little to conceal, this is the best introduction to the true cultural heritage of the civilization which has dominated the world stage for at least five hundred years, and is only now heading toward - obliteration? Hard to say. But maybe at least you can see now what is worth preserving.

Dharma for One

2009-05-10T06:17:00.008-05:00

Actually, dharma for four, yesterday (not these four; this pic is from the retreat). It's rained here every day for forever here, now - a rare event in recent years -- and I think yesterday most of the little Zennies took it as a good day to sleep in, or whatever it is people do when they're lazy. Personally, that's one vice I don't' have much temptation toward, so it's hard to know. Maybe they lay in bed counting their toes, or other things.

Not that I minded. To be fair, several of our regular sitters were out of town in exotic locations, either because they don't have to work, or their work takes them to such places. Mine, unfortunately, keeps me tethered.

No, the dependable Dharma for One comes on Thursday mornings, at the "Multi-Sangha" sit which was begun for a member of another group who's quit coming, and a member or ours who's done the same. They both have good reasons not to come; I don't, so I do. I actually enjoy that one. And of course my own intentional sitting alone on the other days of the week, at home.

It only concerns me a bit because the reason I do these group (sangha) sittings is, first because I enjoy the company -- a rare thing for me, who would rather be alone most of the time -- and because I want to provide an opportunity for people to sit zazen, and to have enough support to be able to get their own practices going. Not that I would proselytize for zazen. I've realized that most of the people who come to us come already knowing it's what they need to do. The rare ones who come for some other reason usually drift off to an easier, softer practice. There are plenty of people out there who will spoon feed you "Buddhism" if that's what you want. And there are other groups who will make you work, too, don't get me wrong. But there's no reason or purpose trying to convert anyone. As I said, they come.

And to tell the truth, there is a bit of "steering" to be done, if people are to get it right. People come wanting to solve their problems, or to get enlightenment. Or because they want to calm their stresses, or find meaning. All those things can happen, but not if you try for them. And ultimately the only real reason to sit zazen -- well, the real Zen teachers would say, is to sit zazen. I'd say it's to experience what's there, whatever that is, and accept it as it is. To stare at its uninterpreted face, nod, and say, OK. Let's go.

I've been saying for a few years now is that the main reason I thing it's important that people who want this habit, this ability and this perception, to have it, as that there are hard times ahead. For most of us, the end of times. And I don't mean just in the sense that we're all gonna die, eventually. I mean that the survival of the world as it is now, is untenable . The only way that the human race can survive, is that people will die, en masse. The earth will cleanse itself of its excess; either that or the planet, the host itself will die, and we the virus will die with it. I hope the former happens, given the choice. But it won't be pleasant. Could be no one reading this, including me, will be around in ten years, or less. Could happen. I still think pandemic, natural or manufactured, is the mostly likely option. Pick your poison.

I think that zazen will enable you to stare into the face of the most horrible of times, which is not death but the other stuff that happens first, and accept it. Not that you'll like it. You may still scream, and depending, you may still fight. That's good. You'll do what you'll do. But you'll understand what that moment is. And live in it. This I believe. That hasn't changed.

But something else has changed for me, lately. I'm observing that humanity has a habit of surviving when it shouldn't, and that so do its individuals and its cultures. And so I'm thinking that some of us will probably be alive in a few years. Maybe not me, but still us. Under what circumstances, I can't say. I just watched this wonderful German TV mini-series called Dresden. And since I was a child I've had this version of walking through a city in ruins. That, I think, is inevitable for survivors.

Because what I'm pretty sure won't survive, is multiculturalism. I don't mean that only one culture will survive; I certainly hope not, and if I had to make odds on what that would be, I don't like what I see. The world has more than enough Muslims, and they're growing every day. More on that some other day. And maybe not in this blog. But if there's any religion crazier than Christianity, it's Islam. That's just the truth. Deal with it.

I' m not a big fan of multiculturalism, or what's usually referred to as diversity, anyway. I got attacked for this last year, but I still stand up for it. What's commonly seen as diversity, is cultural homogeneity. I love true cultural diversity. I love walking the streets of an alien culture, when it can be done reasonably safely. It's getting harder to do. They've all been blended together, by force of law, and by the machinations of the international consumer machine that reduces Chinese culture to restaurants. We pick and choose here and there. We do it in our religions, too.

And yes, I think that when times get hard, we will break up into groups, and we will fight each other. That's not optimal; it's just inevitable. When times get hard, you will look out for you and your own, whoever you perceive that to be. It's in your genes.

So there really is a point, or two, to all this. More on the other stuff later.

The first is, if one of the motivations I have in encouraging zazen is that it will help people enable hardship, it would first be necessary that the people coming to it, come not for entertainment or out of curiosity, or for that cushy warm glow better supplied by brandy. It would be necessary that they seek it, as the old proverb says, with their hair on fire. Nothing else will get you where you need to be, to get to the bottom. Otherwise I may be enjoying myself and telling myself I'm making a difference, when in fact, I'm just wasting my time. I have to sit with that a bit more and see where it goes.

There's another point, too. It has to do with what you see when you get down to the bottom that you can get to in zazen, where form is emptiness and emptiness is form and yada-yada, and in which you realize that although you don't exist, it's all up to you. And you can build up with there with the values you choose, or which are so ingrained in you that if they're not there, you're not you anyway. And that's where I find my values don't have much to do with the "philosophy" of Zen, which I'm finding is a beast quite different from the practice -- and which I'm finding, to be honest, is neither interesting nor helpful to be at this point. I'm finding those values in quite a different place. Values that can help to rebuild a new world, or to try to preserve what I see to be the best of the old one.

But more of that later. I've pissed off enough PC Buddhists and others already, and this one is getting long (as they do when I don't write for a few weeks). Save your steam, I guarantee I can raise your hackles another time. But maybe not here; I haven't decided. See the previous blog.

Oh, if the title seems familiar; it's not that other multicultural Buddhism I'm referencing; it's this stuff; old school great stuff (you can skip the first 1:28 if you're in a hurry).

April Showers

2009-04-21T05:14:00.004-05:00

I've been so busy this month until now, that I'd barely taken notice of what time of year it was. April was never a very significant month for me until a few years ago, when it became a time of milestones. Six years ago my mother died, as part of a nexus of events which threw my life into chaos for a year or more and changed everything forever. A year ago, I had to have Ms. Johnson put to sleep. It was also in April three years ago that I discovered the Atlanta Soto Zen Center, an event which over time led to the changes in my own life and the lives of other Zen practitioners in Nashville which are probably the biggest stabilizer in my life today. Then there was this year's NZC retreat.

I came to this realization last night while watching Storm Over Mount Blanc, a surprisingly gripping 1930 German movie, my favorite so far of Dr. Fanck's mountain films - starring among others Leni Riefenstahl (of course!) and Ernt Udet (who was, interestingly, Germany's number two flying ace in WWI, behind Richthofen, of Snoopy fame). The film is an amazing depiction of man against mountain, all the more interesting when you realize that there were no stunts, in the modern sense, and no special events. Real mountain, real glaciers, real athletes.

The film itself is full of storms, and it was after the movie, when I went to bed early, that the real storm moved in. I've always loved storms, but I was rarely uneasy; the tornadoes last week did damage to the homes of people I know. Which seems to be the metaphor for current unease about these Ratzaz Diaries, among other things.

I think I began this blog because I felt isolated. Maybe a bit because I still felt, in the aftermath of my mother's death two years before, I still needed someone to talk to, and although I had some people I cared about in my environment, I had to go out of my way to carry on an intelligent conversation. That is, I was surrounded by nutball right-wing Christians and nonthinkers of every stripe at work, and I was frustrated in my search for the "spiritual" path I was looking for in my return to Buddhism a year earlier. The earliest Ratzaz Diaries entries (go look!) were rants against Christianity and the Bush administration. I think everyone finally figured out the Bush administration -- eight years too late, at least -- and I rarely hear from the Christians these days, or at least the oppressive variety.

So the Ratzaz Diaries lacks a focus -- instead of lashing out, it is more likely to celebrate. Which is okay of course. But there's a more insidious issue; I have friends now, and what is more, because I still seem to be the main communications outlet for the Nashville Zen Center (since inability to communicate is probably my biggest gripe about the people I now call my friends, which is not bad, considering how I felt about most of the people in my environment 3 1/2 years ago when I began) -- I find myself being (shudder!) careful about what I say.

Because I never wanted to be a spokesman for anyone but myself. I never want my own opinions to be mistaken for the opinion of a group, especially the NZC, or any of my Zen teachers, or even of my friends. And I find myself in a position in which it's hard to make that distinction easily. My principal Zen teacher, Michael Elliston, has encouraged me to let my zazen take me where it takes me, even if it's not where I thought I was going. And in many ways, the way I would express what I've learned so far would not fit into any Buddhist text. Thanks also to Brad Warner, for writing the book which brought me back to Zen from the particular angle of learning from practice, and not approaching "from the top down" -- from theory. That has made all the difference.

I still shudder at almost every dharma talk. Except for rare, brilliant moments, like Saturday night April 11 at Penuel Ridge. But more on that some other time.

And really, my personal opinions are not as strident as they were in late'05. I voted for Obama, he won, and though I don't agree with a lot of what the present administration is doing, I really hate to think what could have happened if the Republicans had remained in power. Indeed, it is the failure of the Obama administration to pursue and punish the villains of the previous one that is my biggest peeve with it right now; I conceptualized and then failed to write "Leon Panetta at Nuremberg."

I had a "friend" from one of these "Buddhist" events who really wanted me to write about politics. And I did. And when months later I wrote of rediscovering my own ethnic and cultural heritage, she decided that I was some sort of White Supremacist or something (which was not at all based in what I wrote) and decided not to be my friend. Which of course she never was; I can't imagine every excising a true friend from my life for any opinion they might hold. And strangely enough from that episode, the Zen practitioners came to my defense. Which tells me a couple of things.

First, that I find myself sharing more of parts of myself with my fellow Zen people only. And that's a little scary really, because I never want to be seen, or to think of myself, as withdrawing into some sort of closed group, especially of others who share my opinions on something. But it's not really that -- it's the ability to see clearly I cherish, and at this point it's the people who've been practicing zazen for a while who can do that,. The "Buddhists" without the essential practice can never see that, because they've simply exchanged one set of delusions for another. I never said any of the things that my false friend thought I said; she was simply incapable of seeing what I was really saying.

But a part of me is not really content to let the Ratzaz Diaries go on being a shadow of its former self. So you tell me: can I continue to say what I really think without having my words be taken as the twisted manifesto of the Nashville Zen Center? I really don't mind driving people away from me personally, if they don't understand me. I do dread the thought of fucking with someone's zazen practice because they mistakenly take me as some sort of leader, and think that my thoughts have anything to do with the totally personal development and "blossoming" they can realize through their own practice.

I even thought of abandoning this blog to the lotus-sniffers and developing another anonymous blog to get a little more virulent. Opinions?

Photos courtesy of Sharon Bogner.

Nashville Zen Center Spring Retreat '09

2009-04-13T05:39:00.004-05:00

If I ever needed a reminder that zazen is a physical practice, I have it this morning. Every muscle in my body is sore - sore in that way that makes it hard to move when you first get up and send you right back to bed til you convince yourself otherwise. I mean, I've been on a physical fitness binge (for me) since about mid-February, working out (step aerobics and yoga) since the third week of February, and I was probably more sore this morning that at any point in that period.

The occasion was the Nashville Zen Center Spring Retreat at Penuel Ridge Retreat Center, just out of town here toward Ashland City, out in the country where the cell phones work slowly, if at all. I had looked forward to and dreaded this one. It was the bookend to a transition period in the Zen practice of both myself and the NZC, the "[" to a "[" that began with the legendary (in my own mind) Empty Well retreat in March of '06 that also happened to feature Brad Warner. I knew that the outreach I'd made to the Atlanta Soto Zen Center the month following, had made all the difference in my own Zen practice, and I wanted to see if the NZC had been revived as well. It has. The transition period is over, and I'm excited to see where it goes from here. Since it's Zen, there's nowhere else for it to go, of course. But still...

And to tell the truth, it hasn't been a period of transition for the NZC -- it's a rebirth. We started with seven people who spent the night at Penuel Ridge on Thursday to set up, hit a dozen on Friday and it just got bigger and better from there. Most of the people who came, stayed. The people who made up the old NZC just didn't get the concept of a retreat, and used to drop in for a few hours, say, on Saturday when the wife didn't have them busy clearing the garage, and that was it. But I'm really proud of our new people. And I'm proud of us for rebuilding the NZC the way we did it. We made it real, with no compromises. If you want to start a "Zen" group these days, it's easy to do, especially in a town like Nashville with very little background of authenticity in Buddhism. I mean, there are Vipassana and Tibetan groups which have real teachers, with all that that entails, but if there's been a real Zen practice, it had to have been before my time here. It's easy to fool the hungry, and people have done that, exploiting the "Barnes and Noble Buddhists" (thanks for that phrase to one of our new members) by offering them more Talky Buddhist Shit. If you've got the money, you can jet off to France and join up with the Thich Nhat Hanh Army of Pablum, or you can just get your ordination out of a cereal box; it doesn't matter.

For our newcomers, we offered the unrelenting: seven to eight hours a day of zazen. We had two very different teachers: Taiun Michael Elliston, Atlanta Soto Zen Center Abbott, who built a real Zen school in Atlanta over thirty years ago, and who is the head of the Silent Thunder Order, the disciples of Soyu Matusuoka; and Brad Warner, author of three books starting with Hardcore Zen through his latest, Zen Wrapped in Karma Dipped in Chocolate, head of the Dogen Sangha, the disciples of Gudo Nishijima. We had originally planned the retreat with Elliston Sensei, who had to pull out due to an unrealized prior commitment, and was able to make it up only for Saturday night and Sunday, for our Jukkai ceremony. Meanwhile, Brad was coming through the area, sort of, and happened to email me after the retreat dates were already set, being available just at the right time. Of course I said, hell yeah, and the Monsters of Zen retreat was on.

I was a little scared of this one. I couldn't handle another failed retreat at Penuel Ridge, especially with Brad present again. And the idea of having the two men whom I consider my teachers both present, if the new NZC had failed to appear in droves like the old one did, would've been just too much. But I had nothing to fear. By sticking to the real practice -- by leaving the armchair Zen of the old NZC and refusing to be seduced by the New Age crap and the "all is one" Unitarianism of the blenders -- we attracted the real people, the genuine article. And in attending their first Zen retreat, our new people made it work. Our first-time Tenzo pulled off the whole operation (which means running the meals and the housing) better than a lot of veterans I've seen. And Zen happened.

I was able to make a few modifications I thought would help. A little Yoga stretch every day. A good hiking Rinzai-style kin-hin on Saturday afternoon when the rain stopped (possible the best remnant of the NZC old school). But for the most part we didn't pull any punches on the zazen, which is why I'm so damned sore this morning. And our new members are too: Congratulations, you've found the real practice.

There's more to talk about. The semi-impromptu Q & A session Saturday night with both teachers was about the best I've ever seen anywhere, especially for the nubies. And I was reassured: doing right, is right, even when it's hard, even when at first people don't understand.

The pic at the top is not from this retreat; it's from the ASZC March '08 zazenkai, with these same two teachers. I'm waiting for someone to send me pics from this one; I just couldn't wait to get this up. Congratulations, guys. I won, you won. More soon to come.

And come see Brad at Davis-Kidd in Green Hills tonight at 7. I understand there will be a guitar involved.

"Stripped" - Leni meets Rammstein!

2009-04-04T22:32:00.004-05:00

OK now, this is such a strange coincidence that I just had to post it. I just finished watching Disc 2 of Leni Riefenstahl's Olympia, which is Olympia: Festival of Beauty (Disc 1 was released separately in theaters as Olympia: Festival of Nations). If you missed that blog, shame on you; it was one of the more important recent ones, to me. Anyway, I pop in my latest Netflix disc of Rammstein music video, and in the seventh one I stark recognizing the scenery.

Yep, not only is "Stripped" the first Rammstein song I've ever heard in English, but the video itself is 100 % Leni - from Olympia! Just to show you that great art is eternal...

Although this is not my favorite Rammstein song, they do a good job with the movie footage. This is for those of you who complain that there's not enough nudity on this blog. Enjoy!

Return to the Black Diamond Sutra

2009-04-03T05:23:00.005-05:00

I woke up this morning with the intense conviction that I need to make more room in my life for myself and my art. But I have no art. Such, I guess, is the nature of dreams.

Most people would probably think that this "realization" is nothing but another expression of selfishness. After all, I have more "room" in my life than most people. I live alone; I have no family except some stuffed mole-rats, since the passing of Ms. Johnson, and I've gone to great lengths to keep it that way. I see my father maybe every other week and although I enjoy his company, I find myself resenting the time I spend trying to read through the blaring TV. My job is stupid, as I think all jobs are probably stupid; I just got lucky enough to dispel the illusion of career early enough, to eternally bask in the pointlessness of meaningless labor. I have recently re-committed to my physical exercise routine, which is probably the most important thing I can do at this point in my life, although the exuberance I discovered when I started it twenty-three years ago is hard to find these days, and I am probably fighting a rearguard battle against the deterioration I see in myself and those around me, more than trying to advance, as I was all those years ago.

Then there's the Zen stuff. I both look forward to and dread the Nashville Zen Center's Spring Retreat at Penuel Ridge over Easter weekend. My role as a Zen "leader" and organizer began almost exactly three years ago, at a largely failed though strangely rewarding retreat at the same location, with the same teacher. I've belabored that occasion enough herein. At this point, I long for a retreat, but I dread the role I'll have to assume in this one. I long for the simplicity (from my lowly participant's point of view) of the retreats I discovered in Atlanta just three years ago, driven there by the farcical nature of what passed for Zen here. I long for the time in which I could spend that adversary but always productive time with myself, without dealing with the maintenance of others.

But no, I have to organize, and lead and produce, and to what end? I have no desire to teach Zen, and no qualifications to do so. If people can only sit up straight and sit still, Zen will teach itself. I have enough compassion to want others to have the opportunity I have found, the framework within which to do what they need to do. At this point, I have no real interest in being a part of that framework. Atlanta should give them all they need, and there are others here to carry on that spirit here. I just want to go back where no one knows me, as a student, and sit quietly.

This Easter weekend, anyone who truly seeks will be able to find. They have Michael Elliston and the ASZC for the aforementioned framework, organization and competence. They have Brad Warner, for the primal spirit and need to know, the work that brought me back to Zen in the first place. They who do not find what they need at this event -- I have nothing further to offer them.

Me? I want to go back to the mountain films of Arnold Fanck and Leni Riefenstaller. I find inspiration in strange places of history in these days. Germany in the twenties and thirties of the last century - the American Civil War (the real one, expressed so well in The American Heritage History of the Civil War, not the tripe you read these days about Lincoln freeing the slaves. Lincoln was a pompous politico, and the freed slaves can go to hell).

I find my motivation now in a dark beauty it appears I can only pursue within as, I found over twenty years ago; the undefined (except by me) spiritual practice that I named the Polishing of the Black Diamond within, the mythological adherence to an unwritten Black Diamond Sutra that finds its expression in music dance, and a fine edge of adrenaline, a Sutra that exists not even in my head, for it finds no words, just a feeling a tendency -- a straining toward art in one who finds himself without the skills of artistic expression. I am a failed musician, a writer who's never had the patience to generate a work of substance, a worker of words who's fallen out of love with them. Because the vision I have sits on the edge of a dream; I can almost see it, but I can't bring it to you. I have the additional benefit and advantage of having had philosophy fail me a long time ago. Perhaps it is life itself that is the only true work of art, at least in my case. Certainly, i can't see my obsession with diving to the bottom to bring back the black pearls of beauty and wisdom which transcends expression, as anything else, unless it is pointless madness. And if it is, well then, the world is mad and will be no worse for my labors.

So, then, when these travails are done, then they are done. There will always be, while I must live in this society, a modicum of working to fulfill the goals of others. But I need to remember this time when I feel too trapped by the demands of enterprises I have accepted as my own, when they are not. I need to pursue this dream, where the pursuit is the dream itself. I have spent the good parts of my life getting to this place where no one else is; they need not try to follow me now, because there are minefields at every turn, and I have no yearning to go back for them.

A beautiful darkness beckons.

The little pic above is a poster from The Holy Mountain (1926), the first of German silent film maker Arnold Fanck's mountain films to star Leni Riefenstahler. If you'd rather watch the stuff you usually watch, no skin off my nose, as they say.

Roxy Saint

2009-03-23T05:42:00.006-05:00

I, like a lot of people, discovered L.A. musician/filmmaker/actress Roxy Saint on Zombie Strippers, a brilliant zombie movie parody (featuring Jenna Jameson as a Nietzche-reading lead dancer, that really deserves it own blog). Roxy plays Lilith, the Goth stripper, and I was drawn to her when I noticed that a couple of the soundtrack songs were credited to her. In the movie, Roxy has a powerful screen presence, and I wanted to see more.

I wanted to put this blog entry up last week, but I was split between two videos -- "Rebel" above, which is my favorite song from the Underground Personality Tapes, her 2004 dvd movie/video collection, or "Firecracker" below, which is my favorite video from the collection. I elected to open with the hook. But watch "Firecracker" to see what she does with video.

I can't resist the dark power of these videos. Roxy fronts an L.A. based band, and appears to be about to come out with another release; check her out on her site RoxyRoxy.com, or the videos on YouTube; the aforementioned dvd is available through Netflix.

Roxy Saint represents the hottest, sexiest aspect of the sex, drugs, rock and roll, vampire goth porn culture, that strangely enough sends to find its best expression on the streets of Hollywood, amongst the palm trees. I wish I knew more about Roxy, but you'll have to research along with me. Here's the antidote to your Sunday morning church or your puffy cloud Buddhism. The videos of Roxy Saint are a good way to make your way through the world of darkness alive and still make it to work on Monday morning. Just make sure to wipe the bloodstains off your oxford cloth. Enjoy!

Olympia: Remember the Body

2009-03-20T05:59:00.004-05:00

I think that probably the stupidest criticism of any movie I've seen in that of the reviewers who have claimed that Leni Riefensthal's movie Olympia is fascist because it glorifies physicality. I've actually seen that. I mean, the movie is a documentary of the 1936 Berlin Olympics, obviously held in Nazi Germany three years before the invasion of Poland and the outbreak of war in Europe. Obviously, the Nazis are in full parade. and in fact the film was commissioned by Hitler to glorify his party and his people. And it's understandable if the modern viewer is made uncomfortable, even if fascinated, by the marching soldiers and the ever-present swastikas. The film features quite a few shots of a smiling, healthy-looking Hitler who was obviously enjoying himself, laughing and cheering the sports. Without the hindsight of history, and the images of the later, depraved and desperate-looking Hitler we're used to seeing, the film wouldn't be quite as... strange.

But it's a beautiful film. As I mentioned in the previous blog, Riefenstahl's movies were all commissioned directly by Hitler himself, and were made free of oversight of the Goebbels propaganda machine, which turned out a fairly lifeless product. At this point I've only seen the first part of the movie, which is quite lengthy and was released in two parts. Olympia: Festival of the Nations is a full two hours long and ends with the marathon. But it's another piece of Riefenstahl's genius. It opens with a lengthy video montage which begins with the ruins of the Parthenon and builds through classic statuary of the athletes of the Greek games, and movies to artful sequences with models representing the modern athletes (or maybe the athletes themselves, I'm not sure. Riefenstahl, an athlete herself who qualified to represent Germany in cross-country skiing but opted to make the film instead, appears uncredited as one of the nudes). I would've posted a video from YouTube, but the only version I could find was re-cut with Vangelis in lieu of the original music, and I think this art deserves to be seen, as made.

As everyone knows, the Nazi's intended this Olympics to serves as propaganda for the German race, and the irony is that it was the success of Black American athlete Jesse Owens which was its big story. The Germans do well, though. And I've seen nothing in the film derogatory of the other races involved. The marathon which closes part I was won by the Japanese, with a Brit in second. In view of Riefenstahl's work as a whole, I find it hard to believe that she was a racist. A thrall of Hitler, yes, as were many, until disillusioned by later events. But it's pretty clear to me that at least for the artist, this film - which is indeed art - was a celebration of the athletic celebration of the human body, a subject to which Riefenstahl was quite close, and that was for her, as it should be for all of us, a celebration of the human spirit.

I can't let this go without mentioning that this film, a good fifteen years before TV, was the advent of modern sports coverage. You really should see it, for its groundbreaking methods as well as for its artistic beauty, and for its fascination as history. It takes you into a part of the life and the soul of 1936 quite unlike anything else I've seen. And it leads me to want to investigate further certain oddities - why no Russian athletes? And anything that motivates us to reduce our ignorance is worth our attention.

And, to get back to that idiotic reviewer's comment with which I opened: It's a sad critique of our intelligentsia that someone could say that a celebration of athleticism is fascist. And it's said that anyone could hear this without being offended, as a human living in a human body. I'm no athlete, but I do work out frequently for the pure joy and immediateness of the human experience. I've been doing various forms of cardio since about 1986 when I was 28; at any age when a lot of people are starting to let themselves go to seed, I truly got in shape for the first time in my life, and experienced a level of consciousness, awareness and benign brain chemistry that I've tried to maintain, more successfully at some times than at others. When I've lost that practice, things go badly wrong. Just recently, I've thrown a good part of my energy in that direction, and with the resulting new clarity of mind, am not surprised that the rest of my life has improved. I've been doing yoga for about nine years, not because I'm good at it, but because I'm bad at it. It's the experience of being here, now, that comes from becoming our bodies rather than just inhabiting them, that makes the human experience a true one.

The longer I practice zazen, the more I am struck by the experience of no longer living in my head, but in my body and in the world around me. Personally, I think the value of a good exercise program, one which involves meaningful movement rather than just flailing to work the heart muscle, is underestimated in Zen, and that any good retreat should involve some yoga or some dance or some martial arts or step aerobics or something just to shake the head and body loose and keep us aware. Sadly, many of us who are drawn to philosophy and its kins are so dominated by logos, by the demon Language, that we can't experience ourselves and our worlds in any other way. If it were up to me, we'd throw the books in the fire and learn to tango. Haven't you had enough words?

I just noticed that Olympia: Festival of Beauty has gone, between yesterday and now, to "unavailable" on Netflix. The censorship continues; alas, I have to buy another beautiful film from Amazon.

So, if you can find a copy, go see this amazing work of art. And get some exercise. Truly live in yourself and in your world. Shut up. Touch something.

Leni Riefenstahl

2009-03-15T06:48:00.004-05:00

I stumbled into the remarkable life, art and career of somehow on the internet, and saw a remarkable biopic about her before I saw the full versions of any of the films she made. I write this blog entry with some trepidation, not having seen the films for which she is best known and most infamous - Triumph of the Will, her record of the 1934 Nazi party Congress in Nuremberg, widely known as the most powerful film ever made; and Olympia, her documentary of the 1936 Olympics (which, as you may or may not recall, were held in Berlin and featured the amazing Black American athlete Jesse Owens). I decided to go ahead and write this before seeing those films, based on The Wonderful Horrible Life of Leni Riefenstahl (1993) and two of the films she directed which are, uh, less controversial, and try to reserve my judgment on those other works til I've seen them in their entirety.

I'm wondering if Leni is one of those artists whose biography ultimately overshadows her art. Her life story is in itself fascinating. The first link above is an excellent wiki bio, but to summarize: Leni was born in Berlin in 1902, and not only saw but was a part of, an amazing period in history. She started as a dancer, and attracted the attention of German director Arnold Fanck, who after he found her made her the star of most of his films. Most of early early acting career was in silents, of course. She specialized in a genre known as mountain films. It's fascinating to watch clips from those movies and realize that she did her own mountain-climbing and that all of those scenes are real!

What amazes me is how quickly Leni rose on her own; with Fanck's help and learning from his style, she begun to direct her own films - in the 1930's The first film she directed is the most beautiful black and white film I have seen to date, bar none. If she had done nothing else, Leni should be revered for The Blue Light (Das Bleu Licht), a 1932 film she directed and in which she plaid the lead role. The Blue Light is a fairy tale set of course in the mountains; based on an old German fairly tale which was later incorporated by the Brothers Grimm, it concerns a girl who is perceived as a witch by villagers, who lives high in the mountains in a cave of beautiful blue crystals. Her contact with the villagers leads to the ruin of all, and is seen by some as a foretelling of the then imminent future of Europe. Probably not, but it is truly gorgeous.

Like most Germans in the 1930's, Leni was enamored with emerging politician Adolph Hitler. This is not the place for a discussion of the historical and socio-economic inevitability of Hitler's rise; the parallels between 1930's Germany and the current world situation are way too much for this little article. The uncontroverted story goes that Hitler was also a fan of The Blue Light, and upon meeting Leni, he asked what her goal was. She replied that she wanted to make great films. Hitler replied, "I want you to make them for me." And to all indications, she did.

Leni is known by some as the Mother of Modern film. From what I've seen of Olympia, I can understand how it changed the filming of sports (and thus modern sport itself) forever. The reason I haven't seen Triumph of the Will is that it isn't available on Netflix. Amazing how we, in our supposedly free society, will censor a film on the basis that it was propaganda for a political party and a government that we see (justifiably, of course) as opposed to freedom! Are the folks at Netflix truly afraid that Hitler will rise again, based on this film? That must be some amazing propaganda! I understand that the entire 1934 Nuremberg rally was staged around the film itself - I can't wait to see it.

Leni herself denied that she was an active Nazi, the girlfriend or collaborator of Hitler. It's certainly true that if you were a German in that period, if Hitler wanted you to make films, you either made films or ran like hell. And if you're the true artist that Leni was, if you're going to have to make a propaganda film, you'll make the best damn propaganda film you can.

From her bio's (and I intend to read more, as I intend to see more, as my fascination is ongoing), history disputes Leni's lack of complicity. The reports indicate that she was starstruck by Hitler and continued to support him well into the war. On the other hand, her career as a war correspondent for the Nazis ended abruptly when she protested the abuse of some Polish peasants (if you weren't a favorite of Hitler, that kind of protest got you dead). Another interesting point: all Nazi propaganda including films was under the aegis of Goebbels, but Leni was responsible to Hitler only. Thus the massive budgets and films made carefully with time and care.

Leni was widely seen as a Nazi collaborator, though cleared as such by the tribunals after the War. She was banned by Hollywood and by film companies worldwide, and never released a film after the War until Tiefland, made during the War but not released until 1954. Tiefland is another very visually interesting film, made under the harshest and most bizarre of historical circumstances. Its filming moved from Spain where it was set back to Germany, for obvious reasons when War broke out. Leni herself plays the leading role -- remember that she was around 40 at the time -- which was obviously written for a much younger actress, because all the actresses she wanted were unavailable. It's a disappointing, although very interesting film, mostly for that reason of casting. Leni has also been reviled for this film because when she requested extras, she got concentration camp inmates, most of whom later died at Auschwitz. She denied this, and how much she knew at the time of course will always be unclear.

Despite the ultimate blacklisting, Leni lived on until she died of natural causes just after her 102nd birthday, in Germany. In her middle age, she had turned to still photography and produced a remarkable body of work on the Nuba, an African tribe she adopted. Her last film was of undersea creatures.

I really can't recommend the aforementioned biopic enough, for a portrait of a remarkable woman. Leni got her scuba-diving certification at the age of 70 by lying and saying she was 50. As an athlete and an artist, a strong person from a strong time who emerged as the strong female that even Camille Paglia probably never had the guts to praise as a ground-breaking feminist, Leni's place in my personal pantheon is ensured. I'll let you know more after I see some more films, read some more books.

Interesting, one of the works I keep running across in my research on Leni is a book called The Films of Leni Riefenstahl, by David Hinton, a professor (and I believe, Dean of Students) at the Watkins Film Institute (or whatever it's called now), here in Nashville. Mr. Hinton, whom I know somewhat, is also a leader of a Buddhist group here, and I intend to try to pursue a discussion on the subject with him when I eventually get further into my research on this fascinating artist. I'll let you know.

Breather

2009-03-06T06:16:00.003-06:00

Well, since I posted here last I've gotten enough of the things done to which I'd (over-) committed myself, to at last do a few things for myself. The much-debated and agonized-over Nashville Zen Center website is now up, warts and all. Yeah, I stretched the pics. Deal with it. Where's your website? But at last, with the help of someone who understands the tech, I managed to use some free software where it wasn't supposed to go and created a dark and timely expression of what we feel to be our group's true nature. So go see the original face of the NZC.

Our April retreat is now for real. It's set for April 10 - 12 at Penuel Ridge Retreat Center, near Ashland City. Brad Warner has committed to being there pretty much the whole time, and to stay over for a book-signing at Davis-Kidd the Monday after. I'm pretty sure he'll be more than willing to sign copies of Zen Wrapped in Karma Dipped in Chocolate: A Trip Through Death, Sex, Divorce, and Spiritual Celebrity in Search of the True Dharma (his third book) - or I'm sure the other two). Plus, our own teacher, Taiun Michael Elliston, Sensei, from the ASZC, will be around for the last part of the retreat and initiate some brand new (or used) Buddhists. If you're interested in the retreat, which involves 7 to 9 hours a day (at least) of zazen, you'd better let somebody know soon.

Plus, I got sucked into doing some financial stuff for the NZC, and let me warn you now: whatever else you do, if you're thinking about opening a bank account, DO NOT do it at Bank of America. They lie to you, and they suck ass. Consider yourself warned.

By the way, the NZC MySpace page is up and running. So come be our friend. You don't even have to practice. Your loss.

Oh, yeah. My own life. My job has actually gotten tolerable, as jobs go. And in this economy, that's OK. I'm pretty lucky; most of my friends still have jobs, and the ones who don't aren't trying too hard. I'm pretty tired of trying to help people who don't want to be helped, with jobs or otherwise. It's your life; live it.

I've been trying to tell people for several years now that things were going to get Different. Strange. But most of them kept living in their heads, breathing in flowers, breathing out kittens. The one day you run out of puppies and kittens. Now what?

But when I have to do too much of this stuff which is external to the core of my life, no matter how rewarding it may be, my own life suffers. I'm not gonna miss any more workouts (back to the hated YMCA; I love my instructors, hate the institution) or any more morning zazen. The main mistake that most of my smarter friends, and sometimes I myself tend to make is, they tend to live in their heads. Live in your body. I've got a lot of slack to make up in that regard. I was quite aware of it not so long ago, but life needs constant tending.

What else can I say? I'm gonna try to blog more, but I don't feel like political rants at the moment, and the Zen stuff is what it is. I'm trying to read a book which is a dialogue between a bunch of scientists and philosophers and the Dalai Llama because my Zen teacher recommended it to me. So far both sides are a full of crap; we'll see if it improves. I was much better off reading Njal's Saga. So read that, and watch Tideland and Zombie Strippers. I'm sure I'll be more verbose later, after these blisters heal....

Oh, and you must start downloading and listening to Aural Apocalypse. Music for the Final Days. More on that later.

Oh, and here's some Zombie Strippers for ya.

Allt är Slut

2009-02-19T17:03:00.012-06:00

NEW YORK (Reuters) – The founder of a U.S. Muslim television network has been arrested and charged with murdering his wife by beheading her, the network's Web site and local media reported.

Muzzammil Hassan, founder and CEO of Buffalo, N.Y.-based Bridges TV which launched in 2004 with a mission to show Muslims in a more positive light, was charged after reporting the death of his wife, Aasiya Hassan, 37, on Thursday night.

After Hassan, 44, told police his wife was at the Bridges TV offices, in the village of Orchard Park, they found her body there, beheaded, The Buffalo News reported.

Authorities said Aasiya Hassan, with whom Hassan had two children, had recently filed for divorce and had an order of protection mandating that he leave their home as of February 6.

He was being held in a county detention center charged with second-degree murder.

"Our deepest condolences and prayers go out to the families of the victim," a statement on the network's Web site said on Monday. "We request that their right to privacy be respected."

"There had been problems before and there had been prior incidents of physical abuse," Corey Hogan, whose law firm Hogan Willig represented Aasiya Hassan in the divorce proceeding, told the newspaper.

"Name of the Game" by Badfinger (song by Pete Ham)

2009-02-18T14:01:00.010-06:00

If you were a Badfinger fan, or if you missed them and want to be, you should watch the slideshow. If not, just give yourself a chance, lie down in bed in the dark and listen to this, over and over like I did when I was 15. Pete Ham was another great lost soul; I won't be beleaguered if you won't find out about him.

I have nothing else to say to you about this. Lie down in bed, listen to this, over and over. If you don't cry, I won't bother.

Or if you want a more straighforward love song, the following is the best power pop rock riff ever written (Hans?):

The End

2009-02-14T08:22:00.010-06:00

If some strange, theoretical alien historians were to write the history of planet Earth, they would say that it all peaked out by 1970.

The generation that produced Jim Morrison made the final decision to destroy the Earth, by omission. Go figure.

I was a child in 1970. I would've been 11 at Woodstock. I didn't know what was going on. But I did.

Hunter Thompson was there. He saw it all. He knew. He put a bullet in his brain in 2005.

It could have all changed, but it didn't. It could have all been avoided, but it wasn't. We're living in the Aftermath.

Jim Morrison died in a hotel room in Paris in 1970 of a heroin overdose. Jim wasn't a junkie; he was a drunk. There's a big difference, no matter what the 12-step zombies tell you. Pamela Morrison fought a legal battle for five years for his estate; she won. She was dead within two weeks.

I'm not telling you to follow Jim's path, or Hunter's. It would mean nothing. You're too late.

If you're alive in 2009, and you're old enough to remember the Real Times, you know you're living in the Endgame. Unless you're seriously deluded enough that you're still part of the problem.

If you're under 40, you were born into a meaningless world. I'm sorry; I didn't do it. This is the Aftermath. I can tell you how to address it. I can't change it.

Taking It Personally: A Bit More About Zen Wrapped in Karma Dipped in Chocolate

2009-02-10T06:00:00.004-06:00

Sunday's blog rambled all over the place, as a result of which, while discussing Brad's book, I omitted a pattern or collection of coincidences that really brought it all home to me. I doubt that these trivia will add to anyone's understanding of the book (though they might tell you more about me, upon which subject, if you have been reading this blog for a while, you are unfortunately becoming an expert, against your will). Maybe it's an explanation of how, when something comes home to you, it comes home in a big way. Maybe it's just a rare (again, for me) illustration of how having had some connection to events in a published work, however minimal, gives a bit of insight. Maybe it's because I become so obsessed about my own issues that I see them everywhere.

Zen Wrapped in Karma Dipped in Chocolate: A Trip Through Death, Sex, Divorce, and Spiritual Celebrity in Search of the True Dharma does clear up a couple of factual questions I (we?) had. When we'd met Brad the first time here in Nashville, chronicled herein, Brad's wife Yuka was one of the unexpected joys of our retreat; she helped our fledgling retreat cook get through three days' worth of overly complex vegetarian, Japanese and Thai recipes, sent us gifts afterward (and Nat, where are all those chopsticks? I'm sure the food has gone bad), and generally was a ray of sunshine at that odd and pivotal event. I'd noticed she wasn't mentioned much in his blog anymore, or at the 2008 ASZC retreat he led [and that link has a version of last blog's pic with me in it; see I was there]; I hated to see it confirmed that she was really gone. Hope things are going well for her.

Then there were some weird little geographical links to Brad's life that I found both just odd and insightful. Of course anyone who read Hardcore Zen knows Brad's basically from the Cleveland area, and I'm from Nashville. My mother was from Ohio, and grew up there and in Texas. So it was interesting to me to discover that Brad has family in Knoxville, TN, whom he regularly visits (which we knew from trying to match schedules with him, but he talks about it in the book so I can mention it here). I went to UT Knoxville from 1975 - 1979, so I know that turf, or did. What got me about his one geographically is that his parents, prior to the events of the book, had been living in the suburbs north of Dallas. Now, a lot of people have relatives in Dallas, but my mother's sister's family had all grown up in a suburb of Dallas which used to be called Lewisville, though I think their little segment has now been split off as Highland Village. Another little split-off part of the same incredibly overdeveloped suburb is what used to be a little country junction that had no name when I used to visit here, but which is now known as Flower Mound, which is apparently the location of the Funeral Home which had Brad's mom cremated. Another weird turf I know.

The final geographical coincidence (I won't count L.A., where lots of people live for a while. I lived there for about three months and didn't like it much either, except for the beach and Hollywood) was Mansfield, Ohio. It shouldn't have surprised me to read about Zero Defex playing a show there, since it's just up north of Cleveland on Lake Erie, but still, it's where my mom grew up before her mother remarried and moved them to Texas. Of my mother's Ohio relatives, I remember mostly a bunch of retarded-acting guys in white wife-beaters pulling up in campers to occupy our lawn in Manchester, and this one real pervert. But I do remember Mansfield.

But the one real factual-world resonance of this book for me was the job situation. Now, in this dying economy, as the U.S. moves into the sunset, it probably seems like anyone with a job shouldn't complain about it. And I shouldn't be either, as when it's gone I don't know how I'll ever find another. But still.

Of course, Brad was luckier than me. His job situation in the period covered by the book was indeed deeply strange; as the lone US employee of an overseas corporation that shifted management as soon as it sent him here, he had a position with no real duties or direction, no input or power to get things done, but a continuing duty to report. This was already his situation, apparently, when I met him in early 2006, though I didn't realize the scope of it til I read this book. Actually, his situation, though it must have been frustrating since he really did want to help promote Godzilla and Ultraman in America (and note that the names of his employer and the trademarked entities are disguised in the current book, though not in the previous ones or his blog; legal advice from the publisher, NAL?), sounds really sweet in some ways. He was being paid by the Japanese company to live in L.A., write his books, set up his Zen teaching operation, and then he was free (and somewhat funded) to travel all over the country promoting his books and trying to help shitty little Zen operations like we were in 2006. I'd kill for this kind of funding with freedom.

I, on the other hand, also have a job that makes no sense. I quit my previous job last fall,, in despair at falling commissions and the ridiculous situation of trying to work in a department headed by the managing attorney's mother. I was just about ready to start looking for another one, about a month later, when I got a call out of the blue, from the HR person of the company for whom I now work(?), based on a resume I'd forgotten I had online. So yes, those things actually do work, randomly. They wanted to hire me to start a new commercial department specifically for a new client. It paid enough at the base to minimally pay my bills. As the job market had already deteriorated, though not to its present level, I thought I'd better accept.

However, the new client fell apart within weeks after I started the job. They've never really been able to find anything for me to do since -- I keep getting minor projects assigned, which get yanked away about the time I get them organized and running. Most of the time I have nothing to do at all, and as of this week I don't even know where the last set of files I was working, have gone. I'm supposed to get some work which had been brought in for me but foolishly placed somewhere else, soon. I guess. Yesterday, with my old files gone, I had nothing to do at all until I jumped in on the project with the busy people amongst whom I sit.

Otherwise, mostly I've been surfing the internet. Repeatedly, and compulsively. Which, if you work with internet disabled like a lot of people do, sound great. But not for eight hours a day. As that old commercial hinted, you really do get to the end of the internet. Plus, the situation is not such that I can concentrate on doing anything like writing this blog. I tried it once, and it didn't turn out too well.

But now, I'm getting reassigned, and they're going to move me. And where they're putting me, I might not have the internet. And if that happens and they don't give me a full workload, I'm going to go stark raving bonkers.

See, unlike Brad, I'm not free to roam all over the US. Or even all over Nashville. I just have to sit there. It ain't zazen.

I can't complain, really. I'm sure that everyone in management knows I've cost a lot more than I've brought in, which is essentially nothing, ever since I've been there. And they still keep me; it's like they don't know what to do with me but don't want to let me go. Which is a good sign, of course, and speaks well of them as humans. And I still get a paycheck, which is a lot better than a lot of my friends, these days, although I don't know how long my employer will see fit to keep it that way if I can't make them some money, which is what I'm used to being very good at doing.

But enough about me....

At this point, Brad Warner is still scheduled to be one of the leaders of our Easter Weekend Zen retreat, so if you're interested, watch this blog.......

No, the silly little click inside arrow on the pic of the book above doesn't work. Believe it or not, the only picture of that book cover I could find on the internet is that little one from Amazon. Sorry. But you can go to the real link in the text and buy the book.

Imbalance in Balance

2009-02-08T13:23:00.005-06:00

Having developed the habit of writing these little articles, when I don't, stuff just builds up. Which is alright, because if I don't write it out and pay attention to it, it goes away. It does leave me with all sorts of mixed messages about what to write when I do write, though.

Yesterday morning I had one of the crashing sinus headaches I still have, although very occasionally, now. When I was in my teens, the things would come one occasionally, and be relentless -- made me want to pound my head into the dirt. They peaked out the winter I spent in Vermont in 1979 - 80; I had one that went on for days at a time. I'd get drunk to make it go away, and then of course I'd have the hangover plus the sinus problem -- I finally went to a emergency room, got shot up with some goofy drug that made me puke but made the headache go away. They finally stopped when I moved to California that next fall; lower humidity? Different allergens? Dunno. But although they come back occasionally, they've never been like they were then.

Anyway, I missed what must have been a kick-ass day at the NZC. The monthly 5 a.m. sit used to be one or two people at the most, maybe 2 1/2; I understand there were seven people yesterday who came and stayed for the whole thing. And there was a book study afterward! Sometimes it feels good when your effort pays off, even when you're not around to reap the rewards in person.

Which is in a way, good. When I started going to Atlanta in early 2006, I went because I needed something real in Zen that was lacking in Nashville. When I saw what was there, I wanted to bring it back both for the benefit of those who prior exposures to Zen were somewhat less than, and for myself, so I'd have a good context to sit in. I never wanted to be any kind of a leader, much less the public face of anything. But such things happen. And now I can step back from it; except that I still need to rebuild the website, and promote the new MySpace page I just set up for the NZC (and you should all befriend it!).... but the efforts of others are coming into it now. Nat was always there, and he's a much better front man for the thing than I could ever be. Too many skeletons in my closet.

Coming out of one of those headaches is kind of like a hangover. No energy. I went to my dad's house in Manchester, ate fried catfish, and read most of Brad Warner's new book. I'd bought ten copies for the NZC, and I probably should have checked it out myself, but no fear: Brad's stuff just gets better and better.

I've written about Brad's stuff before (I think you can search for it in here?), so I won't reiterate, but his first book caught me right when I was trying to come back to some form of Buddhism in later 2004, when I think I was finally coming to terms with the death of my mother, eighteen months earlier. The main criteria I have for "Truth" from a teacher is when the teacher says something that I've come up with earlier, myself, and thought it was original to me. At least that way I know it's true, for me. And if I'm not the only one to see it exactly that way, maybe there's something to it. Brad's not the only one with whom I've had that experience; often I've heard my teacher Michael Elliston voice thoughts that I've had. But Brad's the only one to do it in writing. Repeatedly.

Brad's first book, Hardcore Zen, for which he is known, was basically a compilation of blog articles edited together, with some filler articles written at the behest of the publisher. Not that it wasn't a brilliant book, filled with exactly what I needed to hear at that moment. His second book, Sit Down and Shut Up, is a more conscientious attempt to integrate views into Brad's own life with his observations of some of the Shobogenzo, Dogen's life's work. The book is again, excellent, but a little labored in the application of the Shobogenzo to the Zero Defects reunion.

But in Zen Wrapped in Karma Dipped in Chocolate: A Trip Through Death, Sex, Divorce, and Spiritual Celebrity in Search of the True Dharma (don't make me say it again), Brad has finally come into his own as a teacher, I think. His resolve by the end of the book -- as he puts it, to be an asshole for life -- is perhaps better phrased as a determination not to be dissuaded from expressing what he perceives to be clear truth, by the expectations of others. Brad came under attack last year, and the year before, from that microcosm which is the Buddhist blogsphere, for his articles on Suicide Girls, as well as his unexpected appointment as Nishijima's dharma heir. He's making it clear, that after a year in which he witnessed the death of his mother and grandmother, the end of his job and his marriage (and we'll miss you, Yuka!), he's going to express what he sees. And that certainly is an attitude which a self-labelled punk-rock guy needs to come back to.

It's really reassuring to know that I'm not the only one turned off by flowery New Age Buddhism (Brad's parody of the "Zen" practice in which one intones, "Breathing in, I breathe flowers; breathing out, I breathe kittens" remind me of why I no longer participate in the Nashville Buddhist Festival). It's nice to know that someone else whose opinion I respect feels a need to address imbalance, not by neutrality, but by supplying an opposing force.

Weekend before last, I went back to Atlanta to the ASZC for one of the zazenkai events I love most. The winter zazenkai's are small events. It's usually cold and miserable, and not many attend, but those who do are the ones who've become my friends. This month's retreat was led by my friend Gareth, who after many years of practice has finally gone through the ceremony it takes to become a novice priest in Zen. Four of us went down from Nashville - a record!

Gareth's theme for the retreat was balance. Honestly, I couldn't see how he was going to make this theme work. I can certainly see the concept of balance as in sitting erect, as in zazen -- when one becomes erect, one maintains equilibrium. But it seems to me that things that most people are trying to make balance -- their outer lives, their various roles, etc. -- are illusory, conceptual and self-defined. One should be able to balance them by saying "Presto! Yer balanced!" Since even the concept of the self is fluid, what is there to balance?

I'm really not sure I understand, to this day. But I do know that as long as there is a Brad Warner to counterbalance every Thich Nhat Hanh aficionado, there is balance in my world.

Despite the caption, the picture at the top was actually taken at a retreat in Atlanta in March, 2008. I should know, I took it. The label is Brad's, from his website. There were actually three of us from Nashville at that retreat: Nat, Ana and myself. Nat had told Ana to guard the car, and then disappeared himself. Hence, none of us are in the pic. But we were there. Honest.

Guest Blog by Jim Lydecker: Obama's Two Largest Problems

2009-02-02T10:17:00.005-06:00

I really have to agree with this one, for the most part, and the last paragraph is the real kicker. The question then, is, "How?" A real cliffhanger, this one. I'll come back and comment later, so check back...

Obama’s two largest problems to face
By Jim Lydecker
Napa, California

January 30, 2009

The election of Barack Obama as our 44th president is considered by many to be historic as Obama is the first non-white to hold office. I, for one, never saw race as the issue – I was brought up in New Jersey, perhaps the most multi-racial/cultural place in the world. And my parents never tolerated any racism/sexism/ageism.

This election was historic in another way: Never has a president taken over under so many converging crises’ of unprecedented proportions. If Obama gets us heading in the right direction, he’ll go down in history as great a president as FDR or Lincoln. But if Obama’s unable to change course, then there’ll be those who’ll vilify him and this is wrong.

If America fails we have no one to blame but ourselves. Since the 80s, we have elected officials on all levels, national, state and local, who pursued unsustainable growth economies. Starting with the S&L scandals and continuing through artificial bubbles of the past 15 years, our leaders looked the other way when paper wealth created artificial wealth which was bound to collapse.

While unemployment marches toward Great Depression levels and wages plummet and businesses fail, never has so much of a nation’s wealth been in the hands of so few. The collapse of the housing bubble wiped out a disproportionate amount of what’s left of the middle class’ wealth. And when there is less to spread around, the result is the standard of living has to be proportionately lowered. Don’t expect the wealthy to live any less a standard of living than what they are used to: Recessions and depressions always transfers money into their pockets.

In a growth economy, most people think the way out of this mess is doing what got us here in the first place: Grow. In an essay in the Register about a year ago I said, “A growth economy is known as an economic oxymoron. It hastens the inevitable demise when a draconian contractual economy will take place regardless of what we do.” Well, the draconian contraction is upon us and our shrinking planet and its dwindling resources makes growth not an option.

Throw an exploding world population in the mix and do we have problems.

Our leaders need to take us down paths, no matter how painful, when circumstances demand. For any semblance of our economy and civilization to survive, we’ll need leaders of extraordinary courage, intelligence and forethought to pull this off. If Obama is going to do this, he has two hugely unpopular problems to deal with on the path to survival.

First, Obama will have to redistribute the wealth. From the beginning, all civilizations failed when the majority of wealth was concentrated at the top. This nearly happened twice in the past hundred years when huge disparities caused revolutions, and these disparities were not of the magnitude of America 2009.

The Bolshevik Revolution took place in the Soviet Union leading to the hideous regimes under communism. The Great Depression swept FDR into office and with it his socialistic agenda. Two differences to remember is that FDR was elected while the Bolsheviks took over in a violent uprising but both effectively redistributed each nation’s wealth creating a more even playing field.

Obama is now taking the New Deal approach and this in itself is frightening: The stimulus program seems to be another way of saying “pork barrel.” Spending money we don’t have is what got us here in the first place. Bandaging a wound is pointless if unable to stop the hemorrhage.

The second, and biggest, problem Obama has to deal with is overpopulation.

We live on a planet of finite resources. Once the carrying capacity is passed, the standard of living and quality of life will decrease. Even if we were able to prime the engines of growth back to their previous levels, the high prices of things like crude, copper and steel will return and shortages reappear. Permanent/unemployed homeless, mass migrations, starvations, disease, war and social strife will become the norm. This does not have to be if the population contracts accordingly to contracting resources and capital.

We need to aggressively begin a negative-growth population policy immediately.

Looking at these two problems, Obama first must redistribute the nation’s wealth through a heavily progressive tax code on incomes above $1 million a year like FDR did. Tax breaks should be given to the middle class and virtually eliminated for those at the bottom. Otherwise America will face a revolution of such magnitude it will make Russia in 1917 look like a field of daisies.

And then Obama must take the lead in reducing the number of humans on the planet so the world has a manageable population. This is the intelligent, humane thing to do instead of allowing us to breed toward extinction.

How to Treat a War Criminal

2009-01-24T05:44:00.004-06:00

In 1941, Hitler's whack job of a deputy, Rudolph Hess, in a truly odd historical incident, flew from Germany to Scotland. That's right, over the English Channel, in the midst of WWII, right before Germany invaded Russia. Some claim he was trying to broker a separate peace with England; it looks like a misguided attempt to save his own ass. Regardless, he was taken prisoner, of course, and was amazingly enough sentenced at Nuremberg as a war criminal.

Nuremberg, like the more limited tribunals following the Treaty of Versailles that ended WWI (and arguably led straight to WWII through its leniency to the German command), ended in a wide array of convictions, but most of its criminals were pardoned or released early, by the '50's. After 1966, when Albert Speer (Hitler's architect) and Baldur von Shirach (Hitler Youth leader) were released, Hess was the sole inhabitant of Spandau prison, a sprawling compound in California. He died, supposedly of suicide, with an electrical cord around his neck, in 1987.

In 2001, as part of an overall Fascist clampdown, the Bush cabal opened Gitmo -- Guantanamo Bay prison camp, at a US Naval Base in Cuba. From then til now, hundreds of people have been held without trial on ill-documented charges of treason; 200+ remain. The United States military, under orders from BushCo, have behaved just liked the Nazi's, torturing their prisoner victims, in violation of the US Constitution and of every concept which underlay the philosophy on which this country was founded. About 500 of the prisoners have been released by the US before their situations could be examined by the Courts. Of those remaining, about 25 have been to Court; all but two have been released for lack of evidence to hold them in the first place.

In 2008, Barack Obama was swept into office as US President. I think you probably heard about that. He rode into office on a tide of very, very late American outrage about Bush's wars of imperialism; most Americans didn't react until it became clear that their own foolish spawn who signed up to kill foreigners for money, were being killed without benefit. Most Americans didn't turn on Bush until they saw that he was an incompetent totalitarian strongman wannabe.
What took so long for the little pig-like hearts of Americans to turn? If their God exists, may he forgive them.

Barack Obama was not my first choice for President, as my readers know. However, as you also know, I've been very impressed with something about him that his naive supporters seem not to have seen, and I sure couldn't see it for all the hoopla; he is a pragmatist, hard-schooled in Chicago, and he is getting shit done. And he seems to be doing most of the right things, with the support of most of the right people. Although the economic news is all bad, this less-than-a-week since the Inauguration, most of the political news is good. Bush's legacy will stain us for a long time to come, but Obama is doing what he can to turn things around.

With one exception.

Most of the pre-inaugural reports indicated that Obama intended to go soft on the war criminals of the Bush administration. This seems to be the case, and that is a crime itself, and a mistake.

One of the main reasons Hitler was able to come to power in the 1930's was the backing of the Worker's Party, which ultimately became the Nazi party, by the remnants of Germany's WWI military leaders, who felt betrayed by their civilian leaders and by the Treaty of Versailles. Not taking down these people, long term, cost millions of lives in Europe.

In addition, in the modern history of the United States and of the West in general, the main residence of social injustice is in the discriminatory administration of the criminal code, between the rich and the poor, a division which was prospered and widened under eight years of nutball Republicanism. The kid on the corner gets busted for a minor drug possession (pumped up into resale by insane Federal codes and boot licking State imitators), and goes to jail for twenty years to life. Bernard Madoff steals $50 billion dollars, ruins the lives of thousand and effects the lives of millions (and how suicides are, or will be involved?) and sits in his $7-million dollar apartment. How could it be more evident, between this and Obama's election, that the administration of "justice" is divided not among lines of color, gender or preference, but along lines of economics? The US government loves its rich and hates its poor, except when it is beneficial to symbolically embrace them.

Bush, Cheney, and all those who willingly followed their lead, the torturers for money, the psychopathic guards, and all their fans, are war criminals by any definition of the words, and need to be tried and convicted for their crimes against humanity. For Obama to let them go free, while your average street corner mugger and the drug dealer go to jail, may be an indication that the accusations of him levelled in the campaign for alleged elitism, may not be wide of the mark.

And don't talk to me about the philosophy of punishment. I have always maintained that vengeance has no place in government, that it accomplishes nothing and wastes money. I have always been opposed to the death penalty, because (as becomes clear now in the age of DNA), it can be an irreversible mistake. I merely say that, if a government takes it upon itself to punish, it must punish equally.

And yes, I can see why in this time of crisis, Obama wants to just move forward, and just let bygones be bygones. But that is not appropriate where the bygones are murderers, thugs and thieves, and he is leaving dangerous adversaries behind him.

Bush, Cheney and company are murderers, traitors, and more, and they need to be tried and convicted as such in a court of law. Obama has ordered the closing of Guantanamo, but not for another year.

Cheney won't live long in captivity. When Bush is convicted, I know of a nice, expensive facility that doesn't need to go to waste.

But why wait? I'm sure the cheerful folks who live there now would be welcome to hold him in their warm embrace for the rest of 2009.

Black Lagoon

2009-01-04T15:18:00.017-06:00

In my continuing effort to introduce those of you who haven't already figured it out, to anime, I present: Black Lagoon.

I just finished watching the last four episodes of Season I; I'd been waiting for about six months for the third and final disc to arrive from Netflix, finally gave up and bought the set, and it was worth every penny. This one is the story of a young Japanese salaryman who is kidnapped by Southeast Asian pirates and goes all Patty Hearst on his company (which betrays him, as employers will). It's an action series with some great characters, the best reason to watch of which is Revy, the Chinese-American two-handed gunner who's the real "muscle" of the outfit. This series doesn't hold back on the seedy realism, the language, the bars or the brothels of Asia, and the graphics are beautiful. See for yourself. I put up the video with the English lyrics overdub; the lyrics, in some Japanese writer's version of English, are all the more chilling because of the language problem.

The theme song, by the way, is by a Japanese artist called MEL, and you can find the video on the special features disc that comes with the set.

So, if your kind of anti-heroine is a fugitive from the NYC cops, smokes and drinks like a sailor (which she is, I guess) and moonlights for both the CIA and the Asian gang lords, this series is for you.

We all have to find inspiration where we can.

Now back to watching Ghost in the Shell: Solid State Society for the millionth time...

Begin in Silence

2009-01-02T08:16:00.008-06:00

New Year's Eve is one of those holidays I could do without. It's not quite as annoying as the Fourth of July, with its perverted nationalism, though the fireworks can be just as bad. Ms. Johnson really used to hate them. Wednesday night, my total firecracker experience was a few sets of wimpy ladyfingers or whatever they're selling these days, set off in the street by the neighbors. Bing Bing yourself.

The day we begin the New Year is absolutely arbitrary of course. It'd make more sense to begin it in the spring, like some cultures have done, instead of sticking it in the week after the Solstice, when everything is about as dead as it is going to get.

I don't know of anyone who's sad to see 2008 go, though I'm not that optimistic for the next few years. The people who voted for Bush and his lackeys in 2000 were idiots, and those who supported him in 2004 are criminals and traitors -- which everyone knows now, but how on earth did you let yourselves be deceived for so long? You should have just gone to Texas and checked it out.

Now we have Obama, who I really think is going to do the best that can be done. It's amusing to me that his liberal supporters are disappointed; anyone who'd actually looked at the candidate would've realized that he was politically to the right of Hillary Clinton, schooled in Chicago hardball, and a pragmatist. Which, may be exactly what we need. The early indications are, he's competent, which is more than we've seen in eight years. The fact that he's over-reached his Lincoln-esque policies by putting some dangerous opponents in positions of power and influence -- hope that works out for him. His invitation to a noted homophobic zealot for the inaugural invocation is a little scary. As a non-Christian, I don't see any real likelihood of the Constitutionally-mandated separation of Church and State manifesting any time soon. But it could be worse.

Anyway. I never did well with the drinking New Year's Eve, hungover New Year's Day thing. It's not a good night to go out drinking, either for your pocketbook or your criminal record. so I've usually stayed in. I do remember one night in the late '90's when I stayed in, put up with the noise at midnight sober, then headed down to lower Broadway to begin my own, independent celebration at Robert's Western Wear, probably to the astonishment of the hungover honky-tonkers trying to stare down their eggs and sausage.

But this year began with some much-needed silence and zazen, joining the good folks of the 12South Dharma Center (who in this case consisted of members of Rinzai sangha Alaya Dhyana, me, an impressive NZC newcomer, and one confused participant from another group) for some much-needed silence.

There are worse ways to begin your New Year (like all of those listed above) than four hour of zazen. Particularly necessary for me in this instance was the stark minimalism of the service. Sometimes the administrative crap involved in trying to keep an organization functional obscures the purpose you're really there. I never wanted to be involved in any of that, but sometimes shit must be done. And believe me, after dealing with t-shirts and arguments over furniture, as well as the prospect of trying to fix a long-neglected financial system, petty as it may be, it's nice just to sit.

This sit, using Alaya Dhyana's minimalist protocols, a sort of deconstruction of the old NZC rituals, was really refreshing. The NZC's affiliation with the ASZC and consequent adoption of more orthodox Soto protocols, sometime leaves us with a bit more ritual than I'm in the mood for. When I did my first NZC sesshin (zazkenkai, really) in 2005, I really looked forward to kin-hin, the intervals of chanting, anything but endless zazen. And when I started my ASZC weekends in early 2006, the (then-emerging) orthodoxy of their ritual seemed appropriate, comforting and somehow reinforcing. But when you cram all that bell-ringing and chanting into a ninety-minute space with only a total hour of zazen, it seems that one has boiled away all the soup and left the salt. Add in some dead reading of dead words, a little singing and extraneous philosophizing -- at some point, you're working against yourself.

So I began my year in silence. Real silence. Ding, ding, sit. Ahhh.

Tomorrow morning, five a.m., more of the same (or as close as I can get). Happy New Year!

Photo courtesy of Paul Felton.

Tuesday Morning

2008-12-23T06:04:00.004-06:00

About 5:30 a.m., I realize it's time to get out of bed. I have my Human rogue over in Night Elf territory now, and I have time to check out a quest I didn't run across with the Night Elf warrior (who's been resting now for a couple of weeks), down in the Barrens, then it's off back to Stormwind and Ironforge. The game is calling me; it waits patiently, taking up 10.7 gigs on my C drive...

But damn, it's Tuesday. All realms are down for maintenance, like every other Tuesday, during these morning hours. No satisfaction for my addiction. What to do now?

I could sit extra zazen, but the NZC's Tuesday night meeting is tonight, and there's an hour of it there waiting for me. Zen is tricky around these holidays. Most of the Buddhists I know are really closet Christians, just waiting to turn the life of Buddha into the story of the Sweet Baby Jesus. They go softer and fuzzier now, even more than usual. I usually don't like to lead these meetings; all the talk seems cheap and just somehow wrong after I sit, it cranks the argumentative mind up, and there's never anything even close to the mark. But now I'm starting to see I need to, occasionally, if for nothing else other than provide a little beans, rice and hot sauce to counter all the sugar they'll get otherwise.

There are practices, you know, that can help you deal with life better. Zazen can give you whole new levels of awareness, if you let it. As strange as it seems to say, embedded as it is in a religion, Buddhism, which teaches the doctrine of no-self, it empowers you. Or just gives you access to a bigger you, which is more powerful. Zen, truly practiced, is not, as some say, the giving up of preferences. That just makes you a dweeb. It is the ability to truly choose among preferences. To realize they are preferences, and to embrace them as you will. To become a true individual, because the substrate truly is the one you make. Am I clear? No? See how words fail.

Because there are practices, you know, that are good for you. But religions, religions suck.

Religions are for people who need to be told a story because they are afraid to write their own. They need to think someone is in control. They need to be reassured. Whereas, in this day and age, that's the last thing you need, until and unless you're about to die and hell then, why not? But if you truly want to be able to have a life, to bear with its horrors in the coming, truly Apocalyptic age (see?), you really just need to be able to see the truth. Then you choose.

And of course these next few days, it's Christmas. Actually, I like Christmas. It's a holiday everywhere, in every culture; the fact that the various followers of the Desert God, like all other godlings, have named it after their own obsession, means nothing. The Solstice is the Solstice -- the darkness before the dawn. Even when the dawn comes bleary-eyed, tired and dying. Hell, it's still morning.

So have a good holiday. Forget about the coming madness for a few days; don't worry if there's no presents this year. If you're old enough to read this, you remember when mankind reached its peak. Take solace in your loved ones, if you have them. They'll be more important to you when all your shit is gone. Someday they'll be gone, too. And someday you come down to the raw bone of existence.

But take my advice; try not to do it today. It's Christmas. Read something good. Listen to your favorite music. Then get ready to tuck in your shirttails; the shit is about to hit the fan.

Adoration of the Rufi

2008-12-16T07:01:00.002-06:00

Everybody had a good year.
Everybody had a hard time.
Everybody had a wet dream.
Everybody saw the sun shine.

Everybody had a good year.
Everybody let their hair down.
Everybody pulled their socks up.
Everybody put their foot down.

- John Lennon, from "I've Got a Feeling"

Ms. Johnson, we will always remember.

Between Worlds: The Waking Dream

2008-12-10T04:35:00.006-06:00

Sometimes a dream is just a dream. Sometimes, as when I fought for sleep with a brain desperately trying to clear of toxins, just a couple of weeks ago, a dream is a bridge between worlds. On that night, I looked at a door in the wall above me, where my window should have been; I opened that door and stepped into a world more real than the one where I lay, conscious the whole time that I travelled between existences in the guise, the vehicle of a dream. In that place, the laws of physics were different, even the animals and the landscapes were different, but the people just as real, and they knew me better than anyone in the place I had left. On that night, I stepped back and forth through the door several times, and to this day I envy my other self who resides there even now.

Perhaps, as Neal Stephenson's characters in his latest and possibly best novel Anathem speculate, all philosophies are true and every existence which can or cannot be conceived is just as real and existent as the next; or perhaps each realm is the noumenon of the next, in an endless egg puzzle. Soldiers inside of soldiers inside of soldiers. Having seen the real nature of dreams and of the self, one sees that each mind flows into the next, and that with the barriers relaxed -- the limitations which designate and create our existence -- one mind becomes another, and all things do indeed become not only possible, but necessary and true.

And the problem of other beings is inherently solved; all beings exist because I think they do -- not in the delusion of solipsism, but in the arbitrary constructionism of the limiting mind, empowered by the disease of Logos. Did my mother indeed speak fluent German, or was that just a bleed-through from my father's separate reality? My own past speculations about the differences between the animals we eat and our pets, led me to the realization that all personalities, including the human ones, of ourselves and others, are ones we create for use in the moment. They need have no independent existence.

The next time you have that sense of unreality, relax into the realization that the present moment is indeed unreal -- a bubble in the stream, as the Lotus Sutra tell us. Yet that unreality is just as real as any other possibility.

So it is that in a better world, though not in the one in which I write, I attended last week's Rohatsu sesshin in Atlanta, where all my favorite Zen people were. And perhaps my friends travelled between worlds in their icy zendo, as I did earlier in my bed of fever, and I was with them and also touched all things. And the Rufi with whom I spent my evenings typing, are just as real as those friends, and Ms. Johnson still critiques my writings after Gnu reads to her from The Cat Who Loved Christmas. And those two beautiful women in whose company I killed monsters play their own MMPORG in which the characters are accountants and bill collectors and mindless drones who fail to appreciate their own existence, and thus mine.

And in the endless zazen which is my job in Hell for now, I wait to re-enter the stream. And re-enter we must, for that, if nothing else, is the essential ground of existence: that all things are true, and real, and permeable, and to move between them without effort is to become God. And when one breathes, he is released.

Top to bottom: Kwanyin, level 25 Night Elf Warrior; Michael Elliston, Jonathon Sodos, Tim Goodson, Gareth Young; Gnu Rufus, Deuce Rufus and HR1, with pets; Hallgerd, level 12 Human Rogue, with baby blizzard bear.

Jim Lydecker Guest Blog: Recession and the Lessons of History

2008-12-02T06:18:00.005-06:00

I'm gonna put up another of Jim's pieces this morning, since mine are serving mostly to draw fire from the Politically Correct, the humorless and the over-sensitive. This post is pretty calm and mainstream for Jim.

I have to start with an addendum. His opening quote is a variation of Santayana's "Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it." I like Santayana. On a Buddhist (?)note, he also said "There is no cure for birth and death save to enjoy the interval." Oh, and "Fanaticism consists of redoubling your efforts when you have forgotten your aim."

But I'll shut up now. Enjoy the piece.

“If we do not remember history, then we are destined to repeat it.”

Everyone has heard this oft-repeated quote and it fits in perfectly with today’s state of the economy and the choice of our next president.

Let me explain.

Recently I’ve finished a book by Stephen Duncombe and Andrew Mattson (“The Bobbed Hair bandit”) about the 1920s from the post-war recession in 1920 to the 1929 collapse. Remembering we had a severe recession beginning in 1990 that began to turn around in 1993, you can interchange the ‘20s with ‘90s below:

“By the end of 1923, things were looking a bit better in the working-class neighborhood areas. Production increased which meant more jobs and products to spend wages on.Outstripping the advances of workers’ wages was the striking increase in their material aspirations. Americans were buying into ‘the good life.’ The creation of this market was helped by the expansion of easy credit allowing the working class to live like the middle class, the middle class to ape the upper, and the upper class to inhabit the stratosphere.”

Duncombe and Mattson then say:

“‘Just Charge It!’ advised advertisements as credit was available for the smallest to largest consumer items … ‘Has our country gone installment mad?’ wondered the New York Herald in 1924, arguing that ‘buying on credit has gripped every class in proportion to income.’ With easy credit, American consumers, corporations and financial institutions were building fantastic lives on mountains of debt.”

Of course, we know what happened as the Roaring Twenties became the Great Depression. The ease for people to live beyond their means with easy credit was a significant cause.

Sound familiar?

FDR swept into office with a mandate. He called for change and beat Herbert Hoover who represented more of the same. In this sense 1932 was a blueprint for 2008. The biggest issue in both elections was the economy.

In the ‘20s, both the stock markets and finance industries were unregulated. This is the reason most economists attribute to the collapse. In his first cabinet meeting, Roosevelt spoke of placing regulations on the very businesses that ran amok under greed without control. Such regulatory agencies as Securities and Exchange Commission were born, which made FDR the scourge of businesses, banks and corporations.

However, since Reagan those very regulations put in place to prevent another depression have been under assault and removed from one administration to the next. “Let the buyer/consumer beware!” has been the mantra as markets have been allowed to police themselves. This was like getting rid of the watchdog and allowing the foxes into the hen house.

Another similarity from then is the huge disparity of wealth. The only time more wealth was concentrated in the hands of the upper class as it was during the ‘20s has been from 1996 on. We know what happened in the 20s with the massive transference of wealth to the upper class. The middle class was wiped out and America walked off an economic cliff.

History tells us how we got back on track.FDR insisted, was getting money back into the hands of the middle class by transferring it from the upper class. This was done through taxes that ran as high as 90 percent on those who made more than $1.5 million annually. The result of this made FDR the enemy of the Mellons, Carnegies, Rockefellers and other old-wealth families who felt this taxation was nothing more than the theft of their money.

And this brings us back to the presidential election of 2008.

Barack Obama made it an issue to bring back the regulatory agencies and the necessary regulations that were removed over the past 28 years. Obama will put teeth back in the watchdog. And while Obama campaigned promising to redistribute the wealth, John McCain promised to “not be that guy who is going to spread the wealth around.” My answer to McCain was always, who do you want to be? The guy who takes the remaining 20 percent controlled by the lower 90 percent of the population and transfers it to the upper 10 percent who now control 80 percent of the nation’s wealth? Do you want be the guy who continues to believe in trickle-down economics, a theory that most proponents now reject? The theory was first used in the ‘20s under Hoover and raised its head again under Reagan.

Our nation has always had a progressive tax structure and the rich need to pay more to help level the playing field. There are those who say the rich already pay over 50 percent of the taxes.

They should: They own much more than that of the nation’s wealth.

The wealthy will pay more taxes under Obama. This is definitely not the change they hoped for. What no one hopes for, however, is history to give us another Great Depression.

Jukkai Ceremony, Nov. 15, 2008

2008-11-20T11:51:00.016-06:00

To see all of Nat's slideshow: Go hither.

If you'd like to join us, let us know.

Begin Again, Every Moment

2008-11-19T06:30:00.004-06:00

Yesterday was my 51st birthday; I've just begun my 52nd year of life. There's nothing that significant about 51; it's just another in a long line of anniversaries I never thought I'd see, when I was younger.

50, of course, was significant; last year, it was for me, a very relaxing event, the unexpected entry into a stage of life in which I'm much more comfortable in my own skin. Or maybe it was my Zen practice; that and my life are inseparable, at this point.

For those of you who have been following, I'm more comfortable in my new job, as of yesterday -- realizing that I may be in a better position than some, with the economy long gone South. So really for me, it's just time to relax, take a deep breath, and surf existence.

And thanks again, to the men and women of the Nashville Zen Center, and to Abbott Michael Elliston of the Atlanta Soto Zen Center, for another redeeming weekend. When everything else seems to be falling apart, I now at last have a sangha to keep my energies up and my faith in myself renewed, which is something I never had before. And I'm proud of us; the NZC was a collapsing structure on a path with no heart when I walked into it four years ago. Now it's found direction, some much-needed new blood, and enough minds with a common focus to be something worth fighting for. What was one of many nest of Bullshit Buddhism has become (with some flaws and reversions, warts and all) a place and a resource for those who truly want to accept reality. I am at last able, with some degree of comfort, to direct those seeking a softer way, and an assurance that they will have eternal live in some eternal, compassionate, mindful Bodhisattva moment -- elsewhere.

No more Nashville Buddhist Festival bullshit. This is it. You've hit the wall, the final moment. No softly mumbling Teacher is gonna save you now. Grab your ass with both hands and hold on.

I am reassured by the national elections. Even if we go down the tubes, having saner hands at the controls, is better. It appears to me that Obama is a bit soft on the appeasement of traitors -- the Bush people need to be prosecuted, Joe Lieberman needs to be on the street. But we'll see. If this country ever needed a purge...

And I'm relaxing into aspects of myself that I never knew existed. Zen (and hence, life) is not about changing oneself into some idealized version. The teachers who will hold that carrot out to you are liars. Zen and life are about Zen and life -- right here, right now, as it is. Deal with it.

I've also managed to scrape some very shallow people off my shoe. Big loss. New flash: If someone who pretends to be your friend terminates your friendship because they don't share your opinions, they were never your friend. You were being used, for something. Let them go.

By the way, the pic above is of the ASZC Abbot, Michael Elliston, showing me how to wear a robe. Hmmmmm.....

A Brief Statement of Intent

2008-11-14T04:43:00.005-06:00

In these brown days, I almost gave up these Ratzaz Diaries. As recently as yesterday morning, I thought about putting up a post that the Ratzaz Diaires were in remission indefinitely. Considering the reception that my "Saga" post of October 26 got, I suddenly wondered if it were indeed worthwhile exposing my thoughts to the world, as I so carelessly do here. And it's not just that; as the world spirals down toward the Greater Depression and I approach my fifty-first birthday, I feel more and more that I'm shouting into the Wilderness.

But then again, I need to worry less about this blog's impact on its few readers, and realize that I do it for myself. Here, if in few other places, I can expound things which are meaningful to me, and thereby try to keep myself a bit of sanity in a world which increasingly lacks it.

And yes, if you couldn't tell from the "Behind Enemy Lines" post, my day-to-day situation is not workable, barely tolerable. I really shouldn't have taken this stupid and pointless job. I have a feeling it'll end of its own accord, about which I'll have mixed feelings. I just realize how rare it is to be hired, period, in this day and age. But eight hours a day of living in a Kafka novel (or maybe Solzhenitsyn) does not contribute to my mood.

I really don't like to explain myself, but I'm going to a bit, with regard to that Oct. 26 post, and the last one. I thought I had laid down the preamble pretty well in the "Zen for the West" and "Blood" posts, but people just hear what they want to hear, read what they want to read.

A couple of readers, surely not most of you, took my posting of the first Saga video and my comments as some sort of statement of a Neo-Nazi ideology, which anyone who knows me, knows is ludicrous. What I meant should have been evident from the preceding posts. But let me just state this: I am not racist, in the normal sense of the word. Hey, I voted for Obama. I just think that all cultures, including mine, have a right to exist, and to preserve their own integrity. And if they want to blend, that's fine. But I think people ought to be able to preserve their own heritage, no matter what that is. And we live in a society in which the preservation of all cultures except that of Northern Europeans, is encouraged. I want to preserve mine, too, but not at the expense of others.

What I don't think is necessary is the compacting of all cultures together into a sort of hodge-podge in which no one has any cultural identity. When I sit down to eat a steak dinner, with a salad and a baked potato, a glass of tea and perhaps a slice of pie, I take a bite of each in turn, usually, savoring the individual flavors and the way they complement each other. I don't put them all in a blender first and hit "puree." For me, that would be less satisfying. If you want to eat that way, go ahead, just don't make me do it.

But our society, particularly in the U.S., has been conditioned by the disease of Political Correctness, not to see what exists, but to see the stereotype laid down by the PC creators, a fairly unconscious entity over a course of years. That conditioning is part of the educational system, especially at the upper levels, and then some people choose only peers who reinforce their own systemic point of view, so that they all think the same -- if you call that thinking!

But let me be more explicit: I am a lifelong Democrat. I preferred Hillary Clinton to Obama, because of her proven competence and the way she could have hit the ground running with Bill's people, and I am a huge fan of Bill Clinton. However, I voted for Barack Obama (what sane person could have done otherwise, in this year of all years?), and I am impressed with what I see so far. Because what we need in a President right now is competence, and Obama shows all signs of having that. I hope I'm right, because the next four years are going to be the bitch of all bitches.

As to other issues: I am not only not prejudiced against, but strongly in favor of, most of the peoples and cultures the Neo-Nazi's abhor. I think most (especially northern) Asians and Jews have a cultural background superior in most ways to mine. I think in many ways this makes them more "intelligent," in the functional sense. Likewise, gays; in fact, if everyone were gay, our world would be in a much better place. No doubt about that.

Because genetically, we're all about the same. All the differences are cultural. I like some cultures better than others; I think some have been better preserved than others, and the values of those cultures are going to help the people who share them, through hard times, far more than the homogenized non-culture of the American street. If that belief is a thoughtcrime, I'm guilty.

I note that most of the responses to the first Saga post were made not on the Blog, as truly courageous critics would have done, but were announced to my email list. Two of them, Tanya and Mark, are people who should've known better. I would never normally give the name of someone who responds to me personally about the blog, but these two decided to use their names in making their rabid announcements to my email list, and thus made themselves public. Tanya's more hurtful comments were made privately, but she did publicly ask to be removed from the list. Mark's public comments deserve a public rebuttal, which I don't want to take the space to do in this entry, which was supposed to be brief. But I will take the time, soon.

There were supporters. I'll quote one of the more perceptive ones, anonymously: A most unfortunate response from some of your readers, though you obviously expected some of this. What struck me was the two most visible responses were more about the perception of others of the individuals concerned than about anything to do with the subject matter – even though I don’t know them at all, and have no interest in their views.

Thanks. You would think, wouldn't you, that supposedly educated people would know what 'ad hominum' means.

And thanks to the others, particularly to the one old friend of mine who commented on the blog itself, albeit anonymously. I wish we lived in a world in which people were free to express unpopular, non-PC views, without fear of reprisals. Obviously, we don't. We do indeed live in a world in which "the best lack all conviction, while the worst are full of passionate intensity." I'm doing my best to reverse that trend.

More later, for those of you who choose to continue on the journey with me.

More Saga: "The Nation's Fate"

2008-11-08T01:16:00.012-06:00

This is a positively wonderful album; I had to buy a copy from Sweden, because the U.S. is pc-censored. If you'd like one, contact me!

Behind Enemy Lines

2008-11-06T01:08:00.005-06:00

Break down. Sweat.
Blacker than black.
Can't take it one more day.
I am a leader of no one into nothing;
Can't take it one more day.

I can't go back to that place even one more time,
But how do I buy you your cheese?
Go down to the ocean,
Let the sun bleach my bones dry,
But how do I buy you your cheese?

When nothing's worth saving, I try very hard to save nothing.
I do not believe in believing but believing is all.

Broken down, sweat-wrapt,
Coffin to live in.
Can't go to that place even one more time.
No one to talk with, no human crying,
Can't move one muscle, one bone.

Fear is a chemical, love an illusion.
But how do I buy you your cheese,
Without going out to the world I can't live in,
The place I can't go to even one more time?

Stare into darkness, no moving, no crying,
Maybe one little tear, make sure no one sees.
Because I'm the dark one, here behind enemy lines,
Who's just got to buy you your cheese.

Lou Reed's Berlin

2008-11-02T18:55:00.004-06:00

In 1973, Lou Reed released his masterpiece: Berlin, a concept album about the sadness, desolation, lust and ultimate loss of a doomed couple in Berlin. The album was a commercial failure, and he never performed it live until his neighbor, director Julian Schnabel, recently convinced him to perform it as a piece, live with an incredible backup band featuring some of the best musicians who have played with Lou over the last 35 years, in, of course, New York. With the addition of interpretive films of the work's heroine, Caroline, the film is a powerful performance piece demonstrating the true and deep nature of Reed's art.

I started getting serious in music about age 12, and by 15 or so was disgusted with the direction music had gone. Looking for more, I discovered David Bowie, and I bought Lou Reed's Transformer album because Bowie produced it. Now, as I'm sure I don't have to remind you, Reed was the main singer/songwriter of the pivotal Velvet Underground. What the Grateful Dead were to Bill Graham's Filmore, Owsley's acid tests of the Summer of Love in San Francisco, the Velvets were to Andy Warhol and the darker stuff of New York in 1969. They were hard, dirty and chaotic, and classics like "Heroin," "Waiting for the Man," and "Sweet Jane," grabbed the souls of the disillusioned and strung out. Where the Dead's drugs were acid and grass, the Velvets came on like speed and heroin.

Probably no one ever affected my songwriting like Lou Reed, even down to his unique phrasing. But by 1972, the Velvets had broken up, and Lou Reed was working in the office of his accountant father back in Brooklyn. Bowie, at the height of his powers just after Ziggy Stardust, resurrected the career of his idol and forebearer with Tranformer, but that album, featuring "Walk on the Wild Side," was a unique and unrepeatable event for Reed, inured in Bowie's glam rock presence. It is of course a beautiful album.

Berlin was Reed's next album. It had a new, orchestral, dark sound, and was produced by Bob Ezrin, Alice Cooper's producer. At 15 I was totally unprepared for its darkness and for most of the specific experiences in it; the speed addiction, the debasement of Caroline, her promiscuity, her loss of her children, her beatings at the lands of her frustrated lover Jim (Reed's narrator). But I was fascinated by it, and if there was one piece of art that left me longing to explore the darker sides of human life, as I was so inexorably drawn to do in later years. This was one of those records that could change your life, and did.

After Berlin, Lou Reed went on to record a couple of live albums, the most popular of which was Rock n Roll Animal, which even drew my high school classmates away from their Led Zeppelin or whatever, but which I found disappointingly mainstream live rock. Reed never recorded another Berlin, though he went on to record a series of albums with a reliable clique following, and the highest degree of artistic integrity. This last April he married Laurie Anderson, who mainstreamed performance art rock in the 1980's with Oh, Superman (watch the video).

Unfortunately, as a concept album performed as a live show, you do get distracted. It's best if you buy the album as a 15 or 16-year-old and listen to it every day with the printed lyrics, wondering what life would be like on the dark side. Then maybe some day you go on to find out.

If you do watch the movie and haven't heard the album, the three songs after "Sad Song" are a bonus encore, including the best version of "Sweet Jane" I've ever heard (and I've heard a lot!) as the credits closer. Watch for Steve Hunter, the lead guitarist of Reed's live Band from the Animal years, as the band leader.

I'm mad at myself now for censoring myself earlier this week. Lou Reed is another artist who proves that you don't make your friends or anyone else happy by following your muse, but you can always look at your own face in the mirror, with pride and respect.

This a video clip from the movie of Reed performing "Caroline Says II", Jim's soliloquy after his frustrated beating of Caroline. It's depressing, as life can be, but still haunting and beautiful.

Caroline says, as she gets up off the floor,
"Why is it that you beat me? It isn't any fun."
Caroline says, as she makes up her eye,
"You ought to learn more about yourself;
think more than just 'I'."

But she's not afraid to die.
All her friends call her 'Alaska'.
When she takes speed, they laugh and ask her
What is in her mind? What is in her mind?

Caroline says, as she gets up from the floor,
"You can hit me all you want to, but I don't love you anymore."
Caroline says, while biting her lip,
"Life is meant to be more than this, and this is a bum trip."

But she's not afraid to die.
All her friends call her 'Alaska'.
When she takes speed, they laugh and ask her
What is in her mind? what is in her mind?
She put her fist through the window pane;
It was such a funny feeling....
It's so cold in Alaska.
It's so cold in Alaska.....

Saga

2008-10-26T07:10:00.032-05:00

Okay, I put this on as a teaser overnight the other day and took it off because I thought (knew) it would offend people. But I keep pulling this video up on YouTube and watching it, so I'm gonna prepare myself for the hate mail and post; it's just too good.

No, I haven't gone insane. Friends, I wish the world was big enough, and was going to last long enough, for all of its independent cultures and sub-cultures to last forever. I really do. The Libertarian ideal is just that. But there just ain't enough room! Such is idealism. .

So. I think this is a really beautiful video and song. So yes, I don't like it that the culture that made this country is about to become a minority, within it. I remember when the world was big enough for every culture to have its own space. They deserve it, and so does mine. And if I hear one more rap or hip-hop song, I'm gonna puke, or worse.

Yes, this is beautiful. And there will be more, on this theme. So if you want to be taken off my list, just let me know. I understand.

Blood

2008-10-22T04:47:00.005-05:00

I'm not much on jewelry, but I've seen this process in others; Grandma left a piece of jewelry with a really nice stone, a stone with clarity and history and value, but the setting was wrong. Either it was out of style, or damaged, or ruined by age, or just not appropriate to the style of its wearer or its new intended method of display; so that the stone's new owner, after much debate and decision, finds a new setting which preserves the beauty and the meaning of the stone, and obtains for himself (or herself) an item of deep meaning and power, which is both a reminder of Grandma and the re-embodied essence of her, and also a part of the new owner, part of a new self.

With my practice of zazen, the deep shining beauty of the essential practice is and will always be there, but at times the setting has become awkward, uncomfortable and embarrassing. As long as the ritual is silent, it is true, but once the mouths begin to flap, the meaning is lost. So I find myself seeking intuitive comfort, and a setting with more shine and natural-ness.

Sunday morning, after I posted my last blog entry, I went to a meeting with some Theravadan Buddhists, who practice Vipassana meditation. This group also has some resolute members, and they have a monk, a starved-looking American who has gone through the rigours and is quite authentic, in the meaning of the trade; I wanted to hear words which were true and qualified and deeply meant, as a setting for my meditation. It seems that Vipassana meditation is a lot like Zen, except that one takes the training wheels of Zen, the focus on the attention, on the wandering mind, and turns it into the whole practice. I think ultimately that has to fall away, and one is left with the same practice; how could you justify running on training wheels for fifty years? But with this monk, with some of these people, I felt that the practice was true, and I felt somewhat comforted.

Sunday afternoon I went to a healing circle for my friend Tanya; not the kind of event I would usually attend, but I wanted to be supportive, and this event featured a guy doing a Lakota healing ceremony of sorts, involving wrapping prayers in tobacco, then wrapping the tobacco in little flags, and then burning them. Joe didn't look like an Indian, but I guess he was; I guess I'm used to Southwestern Indians, where the blood is stronger. He was not the only one there; there was a woman there from whom I felt the real genuine nature of the American Indian, as I haven't since I left New Mexico in the early 'nineties. There was some other ritual enacted, some Reiki and some quiche; but I'd had the little taste of authenticity I'd come for. And hopefully it helped prepare my friend for the great unknown of the next few days or weeks.

The New Age in American has grown weaker as the times grow tougher and I know why. Most of today's New Agers have their roots in the affluence and experimentation of the 'sixties, and for the younger ones, its legacy. Between about 1965 and 1983 (when AIDS rang the death knell of a culture), as the world opened wide and people had the means to explore it, all sorts of rituals and guises of spirituality flowed into America and the West. Some of it was brought by true teachers -- the Zen masters like Suzuki in San Francisco; Soyu Matsuoka, the teacher of my teacher in Zen; Nishijima who stayed in Japan, but sent his disciples around the world, all teachers who were attempting to purify the Zen practice which has grown stagnant and false in the lands of its gestation and needed rebirth in the untainted (by Buddhism!) beings of the West.
Most of what came was fake, and false: those who taught enlightenment by drugs, which could kick the door open but provide no context, and left so many staring into the abyss for all time; proselytizer of every cult and delusion that had run out of naive Eastern minds, and found a new market here.

For the New Age was for the most part an age of sham. It flourished in a culture detached from its roots, desperately seeking meaning in an age of unprecedented materialism. And the worst part was, the culture of the West had always been a false culture, as had the culture of Western Europe for a thousand years before. For a thousand years, Western Man has been ground beneath the dogma of the Desert Religions, the unholy trinity of Judaism, Christianity and Islam., which are not natural to him or to his culture. When I look at the history of a thousand years of darkness, I see the real soul of Western man striving to break free. Within Christianity alone, which has ground more under its cloven hooves than any other, I've seen the attempts at freedom which were suppressed as heresies by the Church and its inquisitions, I've seen the striving for direct knowledge for God which resulted in the Christianity of the Grail, after Pope Nicholas in the ninth century denied the reality of the individual human Spirit; and the latter day attempts at Reformation, which lacking context, resulted in more suppression, this time of each man by himself.

All dead and all hopeless, because the raising of a desert tribal god into monolithic, megalomaniac monotheism, had infested the Western world and part of the East like a deadly virus. How different would the World have been without Constantine? We'll never know.

The World Culture has failed, and as times get hard, each of us looks naturally to his roots. For many of us it's family. As the World overpopulates itself to death, the West has been outdone; most of the earth's babies are being born in the places and to the people least able to feed and support them, much less provide them with a level of culture adequate to give their lives meaning. I'm not much for children, and until recently I'd looked on the attempts of even those in modern society whom I'd call my friends, to keep spewing out children in the face of certain disaster, as naive and selfish. I don't think those children will have good lives, in the way that their parents did. But now, as the cultures break down, as the tide of affluence recedes, I can see the production of those children as a means of self-defense in a World which is eating Western man alive.

If you don't see it for yourself, let me just tell you: things are getting harder, and they're going to get worse. As they do, people are going to withdraw into their tribes. Those who see the apparently unavoidable election of Barack Obama as some sort of victory of polyculture will be disappointed; he is, I think, the last gasp of the same, and its high-water mark. The United States, which was in my childhood a largely heterogeneous culture, has become a cultural mix; we all know that. Sadly, most of the alternative cultures which have taken root here are cheapened, demented and depraved versions of more hearty cultures elsewhere. It was always known, in my youth, that to know Mexico, you had to go a lot further south than Tijuana, unless you wanted to see a people at its most tawdry. It is the latter which has made itself at home in our streets. The culture of the American Black, which in its blending of its African roots with the bounty of America, both the land and its heritage, gave us jazz and rock and roll and so many other great things, now has fallen into the hands of vultures and gives us rap (music for those who hate music) and violence. It reminds me of what I saw in the Southwest in places where the Native American culture had been destroyed and replaced with nothing -- nothing left but the saddest, lowest remnants of the conquering culture, with only the lowest elements assimilated.

Sadly, in modern America, it is the remnant culture, the debased version of the cultures which held proud sway in other places and times, that has become dominant. Appropriate I guess, in the End Times, but not so if one would survive, or at least go down with pride.

The hope, here? The setting for the stone. I can only answer for myself. I do believe at this point, that there is culture in the blood, if one looks for it. At the Lakota ritual, I could feel the vague twinging of my own, thin strain of Cherokee blood; I think I am about one-sixteenth, not enough to really count -- I had one Cherokee great-great-grandmother, I'm told. How much stronger now, is the calling of my true blood, the dominant blood, which is German and English, with a bit of Scotch-Irish --all Germanic and Celtic.

And the Germanic tribes did have a culture, a legacy, of their own. Modern propaganda, fostered by the adherents of the Desert Religions, will tell you that Western Man has no culture and pride of his own, but they are wrong. There were religions and cultures in Northern Europe long before the fanatics came. By the ninth century, the warriors of Rome and of the legacy of Charlemagne all but destroyed the native cultures of the northern lands, and planted there the unnatural crop of Christianity. The Cross all but buried the Hammer. But the Hammer has been reborn.

It seems to me at this point that the true legacy of Germanic man, the heirs of the Teutonic tribes and the Aryans, has been entrusted to the "new" faith of Asatru. More on that later. I am just learning of my own native culture, but each thing I learn comes with a new feeling of relief, a realization of ancestral memory. I have been a Zen Buddhist and I still am, but its style never fitted my personality; I can see myself in the behaviors of the Norse gods much more than I ever could in the meek and ego-denying traditions of the East. Those traditions are very true, for those people, and the traditions of my people are very true for me.

I've been attempting to reconcile elements of my self for my whole life, the more so since I found this practice of zazen, which enables me to see everything clearly. Now at long last, I can say that before the end I've recovered my identity, my ancestral true nature. Not emptiness, but fullness, of a kind that's been denied.

I am just beginning this new phase of my journey. It seems quite likely that I will keep you informed. Be patient, I am learning, too. The only advice I can offer is this: find what's true for you, and people whose goals are true to yours. For all the false alliances of comfort, all the superficial associations are breaking down. There will no longer be one nation here, but many -- there may be one totalitarian government for as long as it lasts, when and if the strongman comes; that I can't foresee, and don't want to, that endless boot stamping on the human face. But I do know that the cultures, the real nations, soon will be fragmented and many.

The New Age is over, and the New Order is here. Choose your tribe carefully.

It's in the blood.

Full Circle: Zen for the West, Part One

2008-10-19T06:16:00.005-05:00

Where to begin? Last evening I had one of those "Ah-hah!" moments which are all too rare, when disparate elements that've been trying to resolve themselves into a coherent whole, click together for me. So, where to begin?

Let me first introduce the new logo of the Nashville Zen Center. This has its own story. For several years now, I've been wanting our little Zen group in Nashville to have its own distinctive, representative design. I won't repeat the NZC's history again here, but readers of this blog knows that we've finally, in the last year, recreated ourselves into an authentic Soto Zen school. Zen Buddhism, by definition, needs a teacher and a lineage, which we accomplished by association with the Atlanta Soto Zen Center and its teacher and founder, Taiun Michael Elliston, Sensei. This, with our newly formalized protocols and the lay ordination of Nat and myself as ASZC disciples this summer, puts us into stark contrast with the old NZC, which was loosely organized and self-taught.

If you still want Buddhism 101 in the form of anything-goes ecumenism, Nashville still has groups to fill that roll. My deepening perception that the NZC had moved beyond this came to a head as I was dragged kicking and screaming this past year into a repeat performance of last year's Nashville Buddhist Festival. The NZC never has, to my knowledge nor that of anyone I know, gained one single member from the NBF, which is at best a soft retreat for Buddhist dilettantes, as it was this year, and at its largest, as last year, a street bizarre for New Age looky-lou's.

The bottom line is, this is the End Time for our current culture, a few years past the unacknowledged end of the American Century. I come to Zen as the only means I've found to deal with the impending years of horror. Those who come to Zen, as I did, are all self-motivated, self-driven, spiritual questers of the first order, and they can't be placated with the treacle of a watered practice which purports to be the distilled essence of the East and West. They can't be found by advertising or lured by vague and inoffensive teaching. They want the real thing and in this town, there's nowhere else they can go. Needless to say, we're not the largest group in town to call itself Zen, but we're the most authentic, and we have the most to offer by way of connection to a transmitted teacher who is not himself the product of a diluted practice. So.

The emblems of Nashville's other Zen-like or Zen-affiliated practices are all flowery and feminine, being based upon the excellent art of the founder of at least one of those groups and ex-President of the NZC. I truly do enjoy and appreciate Lisa's painting of lotuses, but the Zen I was looking for and eventually found was a hard thing, a strong and striking thing which stood in stark contrast to the alternatives to be found here. Luckily, the ASZC includes in its emblem the most standard Zen symbol, the enso. Nat had the idea to use the enso as our group's emblem a couple of years ago, but the proposed t-shirts were part of an idea which was (and still is) not executed. Within the last few months the design for the present logo came to me, and was wonderfully executed by Ana King, our resident artist. Hence what I consider to be a strong and striking logo.

Ana appreciated the irony of my coming to one of our few female members for the execution of what I honestly consider a strong, masculine symbol. Because it occurs to me now that we are in fact, the yang to the yin of the alternatives, and it is precisely the "yin" flavor of Nashville's alternatives, and to much of what I consider to be New Age Zen, that had me frustrated. But let me come at this from another angle.

It has long been my opinion that mankind has been the beneficiary of a number of religions which are helpful, supportive of their cultures, and intuitively if not literally true; and that concurrently, it has been the victim of three or so harmful, parasitic and essentially false and deceitful ones, the latter being the Desert Religions: Judaism, Christianity and Islam. This is a strong opinion, and it is not likely to find any favor in the New Age mind, which is the mind of much of what passes for Buddhism. Nonetheless, I have intuitively known it to be true since I was no older than ten.

I don't have the space here to argue comparative religions; suffice it to say, that for me and for most of those who seek long and hard enough, Zen comes at the end of the road, as Nat is wont to say. That is, by the time you get to Zen, you've eschewed your way (pun intended) through all the bullshit and come to the essence of "spiritual" practice; direct confrontation with reality. There are no frills needed at this point.

No frills, but there is, I find, the need of a framework. I recently came across a comment somewhere by Jundo Cohen, founder of the Treeleaf Zendo, brother monk of Brad Warner, his fellow disciple of Gudo Nishijima, to the effect that Nishijima's disciples had fallen into disarray because of Nishijima's minimal reliance on the Precepts. The truth (or not) of that is beyond my present scope, but it did ring very true to me that zazen, although the jewel at the center of Zen practice, needs the setting of Zen itself to shine, and not to be obscured. As I said before, the Zen student needs a teacher to keep him from getting caught on the ledge on his way in, or down.

The framework of Soto Zen works very well for me; it involves ritual but minimized teaching. And yet it often occurs to me that Japanese culture is a very strange fit for modern Western man. This perception has certainly not been lost on the numerous Zen (and otherwise Buddhist) teachers who have attempted to purify their homeland's (usually Japan's) corrupted traditions in the fire of the new forge which has been American since the 1960's. It was brought home to me recently by, of all things, an article on how Western social networking sites fail among the Japanese, who are loath to even give out their names online, much less their pictures.

So: if Zen and indeed Buddhism itself is merely a setting which although formative is set aside, to some extent, once the point of direct perception through zazen is reached, might not another setting do? or be better for the products of another culture such as ourselves. It seems so, or at least seems worth a shot. But what would that setting be? Surely not the pervasive Christian and post-Christian culture, the taint of which is the hardest to eschew for anyone wanting to confront the reality of existence -- nor that of its sister religions.

It finally occurred to me that the native culture and spiritual traditions for Americans of northern European descent, is that of the Norse and Germanic gods, which although largely wiped out by the insidious Christianity of the Dark Ages by about the ninth century, formed the basis of the northern half of Western culture in its formative years. In the years before Christianity, Europe was dominated by Greek and Roman cultures in the south, and the religion of the Aesir and Vanir in the north. When the cult of the desert god Yahweh was adopted by the Roman Emperor Constantine and established by conquest of Europe by the Romans, the extant Norse religions were all but obliterated.

So why did I find myself, in the last few months, find myself inexplicably and inexorably drawn to the Norse religion, and to its present re-incarnation as Asatru? I have never at any time considered giving up my Zen practice, but I found myself being lured by the Norse mythology. It made no sense to me; what could have less to do with Zen than the worship of Odin?

It finally came to me last night when I discovered a description in an early Pali, Theravada text (in translation, on the internet -- don't think for a second that I read Pali!) to Gautama as a tall man with brown hair and blue eyes! And suddenly I was reminded of my college studies from thirty years ago or more, of the history of world religions and I realized: Buddhism is not a religion of Asian cultures at all, but the culmination of the myths of the Aryans, which are common to the mythology of Scandinavia and to the pre-Hindu Vedas!

The Aryan tribe (and please not let's mistake the real Aryans for Hitler's concept of the race of Supermen!) are first seen in the mists of pre-history somewhere in what is now Eastern Europe. From there they spread into northern Europe, but also through the Middle East and ultimately to India, to the banks of the Indus River, where their fiery conqueror's religions intersected with the ascetic and mysterious (because not documented) practices of the Dravidians, a race? tribe? of dark-skinned people who were there when the Aryans arrived. Thus the myths of the Vedas flowed into the period of the Upanishads, and ultimately formed modern Hinduism.

But along the way, about 600 B.C., a prince named Gautama brought this evolving religion to its culmination as Buddhism. Buddhism is, thus, the culmination of the Norse religion! And zazen is the essence of Buddhism; it is the true and original practice of the Buddha, despite the cultural accoutrement's which it has picked up through its long Asian sojourn. So that perhaps the jewel of zazen, set in the rich culture which is most accessible to us now through the Eddas and Asatru, is the true legacy and flowering of Western spirituality. It could be our recourse from the maddening, yin femininity of the desert religions which engulf us. It could be what we need.

But this is too long, and I need to sit. I'll flesh this out later. This was truly enough to keep me up all night, last night, and too exciting a realization to put down soon. So you'll be hearing more, I promise. This is evolving thought, so if you have contributions, please make them; my head is spinning.

Guest Blog: Jim Lydecker on the Economic Crisis

2008-10-15T07:03:00.003-05:00

For those of you about to watch the debate between two guys who are NOT the best this country could do for a leader; take this pill first, from my friend Jim. Then see what comes out of their mouths, our yours....

I lifted this whole from the Napa Valley Register.

Economic crisis is all about the dollar

Friday, October 03, 2008
By Jim Lydecker

For those of you counting, we are about to pass another dubious milestone and reach the unheard debt amount of $10 trillion. Adding another trillion in record time prompted the Economist to dryly remark, “at least it hasn’t hit a zillion yet.” Maybe it will. Bush says we need to print up a quick $750 billion in order to save the economy, though many feel it will be closer to $3 trillion.

The problem here is that printing paper money may help in the short term but will hasten the collapse of the economy. An economic collapse brought on by debt is like an organism infected by cancer. On the other hand, a fiscal collapse is more like a massive coronary. Uncle Sam may be dead before he hits the floor.

It has been said that “He who holds the gold rules.” Throughout the ages, when gold was used, and laws protected honest commerce, productive nations thrived. However, when wealthy nations — those with powerful armies — lived beyond their means, they had to use fiat money.

The terms "fiat currency" relates to types of currency whose usefulness results, not from any intrinsic value or guarantee that it can be converted into gold or another currency, but instead from a government’s order (fiat) that it must be accepted as a means of payment. Those nations and their economies always failed.

Today gold no longer rules. Instead, “He who prints the money makes the rules.” And the rules are similar: Compel foreign countries to produce and subsidize the country with military superiority and control over the monetary printing presses. Dollar dominance began in 1944 at the Bretton Woods agreement. Due to our political and military muscle, and because Fort Knox held a mountain of gold, the world accepted the dollar as the reserve currency. With no controls, the Federal Reserve printed more money than we had gold for the next 27 years. This sham was exposed in 1971 when the French wanted to cash in their surplus dollars only to find there wasn’t enough gold.

To rescue the dollar, it had to be backed by something of value before becoming interchangeable with Monopoly money. In 1973, the Nixon Administration struck a deal with OPEC to price oil in and only accept dollars for all transactions. We, in turn, promised to protect various oil-rich kingdoms from any internal or external threat. Thus the birth of the petrodollar. The agreement with OPEC has allowed tremendous artificial demand and strength allowing the Federal Reserve to print money at will. Since most nations need to import oil, they needed dollars. This arrangement kept the Third World mired in poverty. To get dollars, they had to keep their natural resources and labor cheap. There are several ways to bring these ethereal days to an end and one is if OPEC decides to accept currency other than the dollar for oil. This could bankrupt us in a very short time.

In November 2000, Iraq demanded euros for oil. The first Bush Cabinet meeting (January 2001) was dominated by how to get rid of Hussein and Iraq back on the dollar. There was no concern of his military or terrorism prowess. It was instead about his attack on the integrity of the dollar.

Another example was when Venezuela floated the idea of switching to the euro in mid-2001. Immediately there was a coup attempt against Chavez, reportedly with CIA assistance.

Real threats come from countries who are incapable of threatening us militarily but able to dismantle us economically. This is the threat we see from Iran. Since 2004, Iran has been talking of switching to the euro and we have repeatedly put Teheran in our cross-hairs. The fear is not a fundamental Islamic revolution causing Middle East countries to fall like dominoes, but that there may be a domino effect where they will all stop taking dollars.

And now matters are made worse because we are essentially printing money to rescue an economy that has gone down the wrong path. The arrangement between the Federal Reserve printing money backed by Treasury notes, both worthless, is check-kiting at its worse.

Warren Buffett put it in perspective last week when he said, “No one knows who is skinny-dipping until the tide goes out.”

The truth of the matter is this: Our currency is backed by our military in the sense that anyone choosing to not accept it will get a thumping by our armed forces. Dollar superiority depends our strong military, and our strong military depends on the dollar. Ironically, no outside military force is needed to tear this relationship apart and with it would go the economic engine that powered what was the American Century.

There’s a new world waiting and it is not promising.

The Nashville Buddhist Festival, Oct. 4, 2008

2008-10-11T05:53:00.015-05:00

"Rely not on the teacher/person, but on the teaching.

Rely not on the words of the teaching, but on the spirit of the words.

Rely not on theory, but on experience.

Do not believe in anything simply because you
have heard it.

Do not believe in traditions because they have been handed down for many generations.

Do not believe anything because it is spoken and rumored by many.

Do not believe in anything because it is
written in your religious books.

Do not believe in anything merely on the authority of your teachers and
elders.

But after observation and analysis, when you find that anything agrees with reason and is conducive to the good and the benefit of one and all, then accept it and live up to it."

Text from the Kalama Sutra. Pictures by Paul Felton, Bob Jarrell, Susan Warner, and Ana King. For more pictures from the 2008 Nashville Buddhist Festival, go here.

More Edie: A Short Film

2008-10-07T07:52:00.003-05:00

I regret that when I did my prior blog post on Edie Sedgwick, I didn't give you a glimpse of her personal presence except by description, and I just stumbled across this on YouTube. This short film features a montage of stills and video set to a recording of Edie speaking, recalling her life during her short two years of fame. She indicates that she was 27 at the time she speaks, so her life was just about over. Remember when you listen that she sounds soggy because she was heavily sedated, in the name of what passed for medical practice in the late '60's and early '70's, which was just as barbaric as today's equivalent.

Despite all that, Edie seems to have matured into a very healthy personality by the end of her short days; perhaps she always was. Who are we to say? That someone can have the perspective she had by the end of her life, despite the fact that that life was little other than abuse of one kind or another, despite having been a shining star -- there's a lesson there for you whiners and moaners. Seize the day!

There's a bunch more of this stuff at girlonfire.com; check it out!

Joan of Arc: The Power of Deep Practice?

2008-10-01T06:46:00.003-05:00

I just finished re-watching The Messenger: The Story of Joan of Arc. I was drawn back to this excellent movie by way of a renewed interest in the Middle Ages and their talismans, via the TV series Witchblade (as opposed to its anime sister series, which is also great in its own right). I'm also reading Spear of Destiny by Trevor Ravenscroft, a faintly fantastical account of Hitler's journey into dark magic, especially with regard to the Spear of Longinus, which I haven't quite decided how to take yet, except as account of spiritual practice gone badly wrong. And while I'm at it, I have to mention the book that brought me to the magic of the late Middle Ages, particularly the fourteenth and early fifteenth centuries, years ago, Barbara Tuchman's A Distant Mirror: The Calamitous Fourteenth Century, surely the most readable and fascinating history book I've ever come near, which I heartily recommend.

The Messenger is a film by Luc Besson starring Milla Jovovich, surely one of the most underrated actresses of our time. Milla's performance is entrancing; if you've only seen her as Leeloo in The Fifth Element and as Alice in the Resident Evil movies - both of which are fine performances - you owe it to yourself to see her as Kat in .45 and in The Messenger. The most intriguing thing about this latter movie (although with excellent performances by John Malkovich, Faye Dunaway, Dustin Hoffman and Milla) is that the source of Joan's visions is left ambiguous. Do they come from God? From the Devil? From some sort of schizophrenia, from Joan's own unconfessed ambition, or from some other source.

It appears to me that in the movie, at least (the historical facts are too vague to even speculate), Joan is entirely convinced (at least until the end) that the voices come from God, and I don't doubt that they did. Which sounds like a strange thing for me as a non-theist to say, but it is obvious that Joan has a profound conviction, of which she was dead certain, which turned out to be true and accurate and led her to great victory.

You have to remember that Joan of Arc was an ignorant (in the non-pejorative sense of the word; she could of course neither read nor write and had no education at all beyond the indoctrination of the fifteenth-century Church) peasant, and any experience she had was solidly in the context of the deep Christian fear in which she would have been raised. I think even modern Christians would have to admit that the Church of the Middle Ages, although the only source of political stability in the Western World before the rise of the nation-state, was a dreadful entity. It occurred to me, thinking about this fictional depiction of Joan, which I think expresses deep truths, that the experience of direct communication from God, of which she was absolutely certain, was virtually indistinguishable in context from the direct perceptions of absolute certainty one can have after a few years of zazen, or perhaps any other direct and deep practice. And thus I can empathize.

I have dedicated myself to the practice of zazen only for about four years, a pittance of time compared to some of my friends and fellow Zen students, but I can tell you (those of you who don't already know) that there are moments of insight at which time the defensive barriers with which we surround our non-existent (though all too apparent) selves drop away, and one for a moment is clearly able to see what is, or what things are, to eschew Zen terminology for a bit. Certain things can be seen as absolutely true, and if one can bring back an accurate enough perception or description of that moment, even to oneself (because the event has to be interpreted and to some extent verbalized to be stored in the "mind"), those clear truths can be made the basis of right actions.

As adamant as I am about my practice of zazen, and my constant battle against what I see as a watering of the practice by those who value the context more than the content, please don't think I think everyone needs to be a Zen Buddhist. First, it's just not a path that's going to appeal to that many people. It's hard work, the promised rewards aren't much in comparison to what most religions promised, and the only ones who find the true practice are those who come looking for it. Which is why I get really annoyed when a bunch of metaphysical crap is passed off as Zen, because people will encounter that, realize what bullshit it is, and go away disappointed. This is why I won't be involved in the Nashville Buddhist Festival after this year; most of the people who come there are seeking some sort of comfortable delusion, and it's a violation of the Fifth Precept to sell it to them.

Zen is definitely the place for me, but if you're one of those people like me who, from the first realization of your human existence, have demanded to know the answer to the question: What is this? then I really want to believe that over time your quest will lead you through the illusions and obstacles to some form of deep practice which will enable you to perceive things directly and truly. In between my Zen periods, I tried other things. Strangely enough, the chanting of the Nichirens was a very powerful practice for me, although the context was absurd enough ultimately to drive me away. Conversely, my brief flirtation with Tibetan Buddhism left me with nothing but a distaste; it is a devotional practice based on illusion, not much different from what I perceive the Black Arts to be.

But there are experiences outside religion or spiritual practice that can take you there; although I wouldn't advise anyone to try it because of the inherent risk factors, drugs can blow open those doors of perception; I know a lot of people with deep current practices and development who got their first glimpse of reality without filters this way. Unfortunately, drugs, like occult practices, can leave the door open for a bunch of other stuff you don't want. Having those doors opened without proper guidance can take you to some strange places. Madness and egotistical delusion spring to mind. Some of us were lucky to come through as intact as we did, and to this day I question my own sanity, as defined by the modern world.

There are probably a lot of other things that can kick those door open: hunger, trauma, all sort of privations. Anything that strips you of your social context and removes you even for a moment from consensual reality can, I think, enable you to see things as they are. But the failing of asceticism is that without context, either from yourself or a mentor of some sort, these experiences can't be brought back into "everyday life" once participation in such is regained. Some are prepared, and some get lucky. Personally, I feel like some of the nasty experiences I've had have enabled me to remember, even when things seem fine, that there are no guarantees. You'll die alone, and things will be about like they are right now. Sorry.

The experience of Joan of Arc led her to reject the Church, the only voice of authority in her day, and the only context she had ever had, in favor of the content of her own experience, which to her was the voice of God. This is of course the common factor of mystical experiences throughout the history of the world; they do not come through organizations. A teacher can be helpful to get you there, but once you have the experience, you must rely on your own truth. But how to know truth, whether seen as divine communication or just direct perception, there's the rub. Because you won't know it until you see it. You will know it when you do see it, but you can be fooled by all sorts of stuff before you get there. There are logical problems with this proposition, I see all too well, but they're just artifacts of the language, and remember, you have to get beyond language to see what's real.

As a footnote, in Soto Zen, a "mystical revelation" or "moment of enlightenment" is seen as just another experience not to be dwelt in. At worst, they are seems as delusions; at best, they cannot be grasped and held onto and should be let go just like any other perception or experience. When Joan's voices stopped, she carried on doing what she thought had been the last command of the voices, and wrong-headed herself into downfall. It's the moment we have to act in, not a great experience of the past, which is where so very many mystics go wrong, so enraptured by their experience that they can't let go of it.

So I understand the experience of Joan of Arc and I think she did hear the voice of God. Because the power of understanding comes not through grasping, but through letting go.

Edie at the Peak

2008-09-26T04:37:00.003-05:00

As America stands on the brink of its inevitable devolution into a Third World country, those of us old enough to remember the peak of our culture-- when, to paraphrase Hunter, the tide rolled in, crested, and rolled back -- should periodically be excused for the nostalgia indulged to do so. And when we do, it's hard not to envision that one lonely waif of a girl who was the first of so many things, but who was truly unique, the victim of everyone who is in many ways the icon and the emblem of whatever it was we became in the 'sixties, Edie Sedgwick.

Edie died in 1971 at the age of 28, a year later and a year younger than Jim Morrison, and right on the heels of the deaths of Jimi Hendrix and Janis Joplin in 1970, whose deaths were themselves the sad cultural echoes of the shooting of Robert Kennedy two years earlier. Edie, like Jim, Jimi, and Janis, died of drugs, except in her case she did so as much at the hands of the society which simultaneously tried to save, enclose, enwrap and suffocate her. I first became aware of Edie in about 1979, through Edie: American Girl, an oral biography by Jean Stein. Although I lived through the sixties, I was a child and was in my early twenties still scrambling to retain my culture; I don't think I had any acquaintance with Andy Warhol's Factory before this other than the wisps of mention on the evening news and in the mainstream press. So I hadn't heard of Edie although I was 13 at the time of her death. But something about her powerful presence reached out to me through the words of the interviews in the book and the grainy photos.

I'd almost forgotten about Edie until Factory Girl, starring Sienna Miller as Edie, came out a couple of years ago. I recommend the movie for the myth, if not the truth, but in this case the former points to the latter. Sienna Miller is a beautiful woman, but she looks nothing like Edie Sedgwick, who was waif-like yet dancer-strong and powerful in a frail way that no one else has ever equalled, not for the lack of trying. Edie was the offspring of a wealthy and degenerate West Coast family; she was a multiple incest victim from within that nuclear family, her only anchor being her gay brother, who was shamed by the father into killing himself when Edie was a teen. The family's reaction to Edie's trauma was not to punish the offenders, but to put Edie into treatment; she was in the modern version of the asylum as recently as the year before she shot to stardom.

In 1965, Edie, recently arrived in New York City, became the first and really only Warhol girl to become a superstar; she was the It girl for two years, dominating the covers and contents of fashion magazines and society pages. In the Factory, or thereabouts, she met with the drugs that led to her destruction, if not the ones that killed her. If you think meth kills now, think what it did then to an innocent generation. The entire Factory was overrun and overpowered by the stuff; dispensed by the infamous Dr. Robert from the Beatles song in the form of powerful injections in combination with some vitamins, and then of course supplemented by the "patients" with their own syringes, Speed ran rampant through the above-ground underground of the Factory. With no cultural awareness of what the stuff really was or what it could do, brains were blasted and lives were lost, much as today, when the populace has less excuse. But in that era, meth started at the top of the cultural food chain.

Edie was indeed a shooting star. By the spring of 1967, her brain had begun to fry, her immaculate balance to fail. By Memorial Day she was toast. Warhol's people washed their hands of her, and the once-rich trust fund heiress struggled, borrowed and stole to get by in the Chelsea Hotel. At about the end of that year, she disappeared, to reappear later in the grasp of her family in California, where she underwent shock treatment and drug therapy which was itself abusive; she died of her tortures in 1971, in her bed one night.

But like Warhol's art, Edie's life became enwrapped in and indistinguishable from a film which began as just another Warhol pic and became her biography and her eulogy. To understand Edie, it is essential to watch Ciao! Manhattan. When you do, make sure you watch the interviews included on the DVD. Ciao! was originally written for another Warhol starlet, one of the many with whom he tried to fill Edie's shoes when she had become lost. The actress' name was Susan, but she became unavailable as the crew went to filming, and the filmmakers John Palmer went to the Chelsea scavenging, to bring in Edie.

The early part of the film, in black and white, made no sense at all; it was produced in an amphetamine haze that left it plotless and clueless. But it does feature invaluable and irreplacable footage of Edie at or near her peak. Such elegance in a human being has never been captured on film. The film was abandoned in the cans, but then Edie was rediscovered in California and was found to be charming and heroic even in the face of the abuses she was enduring in the name of treatment, and she was adamant that the film go on. And so it did, although almost all of its original cast was dead, missing, or in jail. It became a five-year project which in turn became Edie's life. Her life became the film, and her life ended a couple of weeks after the film wrapped. Warhol couldn't have hoped for a more perfect ending.

I saw Ciao! year ago and only saw it as the mess that the film, as a film, is. But I watched it again as the artifact of a culture which has disappeared. Today's illiterate, jaded and moronic audience will never be able to appreciate what happened in the 'sixties, when literacy met fantasy, destiny and death and entwined in the stranglehold embrace which has choked our culture to death. It is impossible for anyone who remembers, to see this movie without longing for the spirit and the spark which will never come again.

Edie, I never knew you, but I miss you. I miss all that you and we could and should have become. As we die up to our necks in Lindsay and Paris and the flotsam and jetsam of a directionless and mindless lack of culture, I will always know there was you, and that in some way, you make it all worthwhile.

A Moment of Silence

2008-09-25T08:25:00.004-05:00

Re: the comments section on the last entry. When I'm getting advice from the Practice Director of the ASZC on where to get chili dogs, I must be doing something right....

The last blog entry was written in a period of intermission, of sorts. Prior to my last sesshin, I'd been hating my job for quite some time. A situation which had been profitable and enjoyable the year before had done to shit when the firm lost its major client; for the last few months I'd been forcing myself in to work every day, even though the money was inadequate and I was leaching off my savings, and the environment had been intolerable, with rampant in-fighting and office politics, not to mention an inadequate workload, bizarre client behavior, etc. So after sesshin, I went back to work on Monday, then never made it on Tuesday nor ever again. So.

And with the national and worldwide economies lurching on the brink, sorry guys, I don't feel like jumping right back into the chase. Froggy in a blender is not for me, at least until I can breathe for a while. Following my abandonment of the job from hell, I went into a period of funk and illness from which I have just not emerged; the last entry, as I say, was in the transition. I did my first yoga class of September last night, which started out as agony as a thousand putrid toxins fled my muscles and pores, and ended in satisfaction and a return to self, as I'd hoped. But of course the self I returned to is not the one I left (thank you, Heraclitus), and this one needs a moment of silence.

And I'm sorry, for those who can't understand. I'm not one of those people who could do the same thing every day for thirty years. I'm glad for those people that they can find completion in this, but if I can't reinvent myself every day, if even in my own head, there's no reason to get up. Who I am, for better or worse, is the product of more than half a century's hard work, not at accomplishing or trying to accomplish anything other than the moment to moment grasp, of What is this? Who and where am I? And if you've never felt the need to do this; well then, that's you.

Today I have no need to validate my existence by seeking a false consensual reality with those with whom I have nothing more than bare existence in common.

So I can sit here alone today, and watch the towers fall, over and over; not the Twin Towers but the metaphorical ones in Babylon.

Then there's the damned Nashville Buddhist Festival meeting tonight, brought to you by people who think that if it's worth doing once, it's worth doing over and over until you've beaten the living spirit out of it. Rest assured, it's my last. If you want to go delude yourselves, go for it; I'm tired to promoting those who would promote themselves. The Dharma is in your pocket.

Updates

2008-09-18T20:22:00.003-05:00

I know, I've been pretty slack lately. I'm going through another period of transition, and although I still don't have a whole blog post in my head, I just have to post something to get that picture of Sarah Palin off the top of the blog.

Also, in retrospect I think I played into the whole Sarah Palin thing. I mean, the incredible choice of her took the national political debate off any serious issue for what, two weeks? And only the recent inevitable meltdown of the financial industry (which is about all Americans do anymore) brought back any attention to a serious issue.

So I'm posting a few pics from the last sesshin at the ASZC, about two weeks ago. It was another physically hard one; at one point I snuck out for a chili cheese dog (that weird fake stuff that comes from a machine) from the local convenience store, and then later that night for some ice cream. It got easier after that. I probably shouldn't post that, because it'll probably get seen by the cook, who is one of my favorite people in the Buddhist world. And the food at these things is truly excellent. But there's a tradition of the food at these things being all vegetarian and healthy, and almost none of the Zen people I know are vegetarians (as opposed to the Theravadans). And zazen is very physically stressful; I did something to my legs this time that I still haven't recovered from, though it does give me an excuse to seek out a massage therapist. And either having your diet shift in that stressful situation, even if for the better (I could easily be vegetarian if there weren't any seafood in the world, which will happen soon) always leave me with a lack of energy; or I just got a psychological bump from sneaking out and violating the diet. So the chili cheese dog helped. Sorry, Terry.

Anyway, enough of that. These are just a few of the pics from the retreat; Richard of the ASZC put them all up on his Flickr site, and you can see them here.

Oh, and if you want absolute positive proof that the Bush family was behind the bombing of the World Trade Center , plus some naked pictures of Sarah Palin as a teenager, click here. I hope to post something more coherent soon.

What, Any Woman?

2008-08-30T05:31:00.007-05:00

I've already told you how I feel about politics in the Year of Our Lord 2008, so you can guess how I feel about the Conventions; I've been doing my best to ignore them. Lest you forget, I was a strong supporter of Hillary Clinton, thinking that was the only way to bring back any effective rational behavior on the part of "our" government, and I feel that Obama is probably well-meaning, but is also a self-important blowhard whose followers are naive idealists. But I'm gonna vote for him because he's better than four more years of McSame; the Republicans need to go down, even if it's just for the show value.

Nevertheless, I was relieved at Obama's choice of Joe Biden as Veep; Biden is an experienced fighter with good connections back into the solid base that Obama will need to get anything done if elected, and I have to admire a fighter (and someone who'll speak his mind occasionally). Of course I was mildly curious about McShit's choice, though I didn't expect much. But I was titillated, excited and like most Democrats dancing in the aisles yesterday when I heard who he'd chosen.

It's often said that the choice of the Veep candidate is the Presidential candidate's first real choice as Executive, and these two choices were, uh, revelatory. While Obama's was very sound, I think that John McCain, with the choice of Sarah Palin, has shown that he is indeed a fucking idiot.

Surely this will be the end of the challenge to Obama's experience! Palin has spent about 18 months as governor of Alaska. Prior to that, her only other office was mayor of Wasilla, a town of about 9,000. Just who I want a heartbeat from the Presidency with her little soccer-mom hand on the nuke button. If you were undecided, here's your best reason to vote Obama: the spectre of Sarah Palin as President.

It strikes me that the nomination of Palin is a real insult to women. Next to this bitch, Geraldine Ferraro was a gem. I won't go on about her; you'll be hearing it all from better authenticated sources 'til November. There will be revelations of petty corruption, and I can't wait to see her advocating the rape of her home State by the oil boys. And any woman who's anti-Choice has a real problem with Stockholm Syndrome.

So, was this an attempt to win the potential crossover Hillary vote, with a woman? Did he think just any woman would do? Does McCain seriously think that anyone who'd support a vetted, intelligent woman like Clinton could vote for this twit? Does he think that just any woman would do, and after all this one's not even bad-looking....

So I was thinking I'd help him out. Lately, I've been fascinated with the work of a performance artist named Boyd Rice, to whom I was turned on by a co-worker. Rice as an early Industrial performer,and was included in that famous RE:/Search Vol. #6/7 Industrial Issue back in the late '70's. In the '80's and '90's he became associated with some really edgy groups, like the Church of Satan (apparently he was dating Anton LaVey's daughter at one point!) and was featured in some White Supremacist media, probably because he'd taken to wearing and featuring Nazi regalia in his performances. Whatever. But he was originally a DJ and apparently still does some work, and he just released an EP with Go-Go Giddle Partridge.

Giddle Partridge was associated with the Partridge Family Temple, a religious organization devoted to the worship of deities who incarnated as member of the Partridge Family. She has had some movie roles, particulary as a character named as the Blonde Floozie In Year of the Dog. She is now working on an album with Boyd, and she lives in LA, working as a dancer and designer. It appears to me that based on these qualifications, she would be an excellent choice for Vice President. Check her out!

In My Absence - Jackie Fox and Brad Warner

2008-08-26T21:38:00.010-05:00

Thanks for allowing me my rest from blogging for a while; I'm still not over it. In the meantime, I wanted to introduce those of you who are not already familiar with two of my favorite bloggers, to some great stuff that's come out just in the last few days.

First, meet Jackie Fox, original bassist for the Runaways. After she left the band, Jackie went to Harvard Law School, where she was in Barack Obama's class; '91? Anyway, I don't know anyone else who could write an insightful comparison of Obama and Joan Jett. It first appeared here in her MySpace blog, and was picked up for the Huffington Post. I'm reprinting it below. Check out her other blog entries; she is an intelligent, insightful and charming writer. If more than one in a million attorneys were anything like Jackie, I might have stayed in.

And Brad Warner has been on a roll. He has been reprinting his posts from his Hardcore Zen blog site to MySpace, and then there's his work on Suicide Girls. Check 'em all out. Whenever I get bogged down by the wait of all the delusional deadheads in Zen, Brad is the antidote. The following is a YouTube video of his appearance on CNN last Sunday morning. His comments (as well as the same video) appear here.

I won't be silent much longer. See you soon.

Why Barack Obama Reminds Me of Joan Jett

Yes, you read that right – Barack Obama reminds me of Joan Jett. They are the only two people I've ever known who have affirmatively chosen to give themselves a larger-than-life persona and then grown to fill it. I saw this a little better with Joan, given that she was a younger age when I knew her than Barack was when I knew him. Joan in late 1975 was a perfectly ordinary Valley girl. You would never have looked at her and thought you were seeing a future rock star. If you'd even noticed her at all you probably would have thought she was a bit of a mouse. She had brown hair cut in a competent, if unremarkable, shag and she had that slouched-over bad posture that seems to be the working uniform of the shy. In the early days of the band Kim Fowley was always yelling at her to stand up straight. When I saw the Runaways play as a three-piece band at the Whiskey, I thought they weren't terribly interesting. Both Joan and Sue Thomas (the future Michael Steele of the Bangles) were ordinary and unassuming. The only member of the band that really stood out was Sandy, and she was stuck behind her drum kit. The response to the band was a bit lackluster and it's no surprise to me that Kim decided that the band needed more of a visual standout up front. By the time I auditioned for the band they had added Cherie and Lita, both of whom grabbed your attention immediately. Joan kind of faded into the mix, and I doubt that the addition of a fifth band member, especially one who was tall, smiled and wore skirts, helped on that front. Cherie was blonde and beautiful in a sulky, fragile way, and Lita had enough personality for ten girls, not to mention lots and lots of curves. Plus they were the lead singer and lead guitarist, respectively, the two instruments that soloed on every song. Who was going to notice a shy, brown-haired rhythm guitarist with bad posture?

I don't remember which came first, the persona or the black hair, but they pretty much went hand-in-hand. One day Joan just decided to become a bad-ass rock star. She dyed her hair black, bought a leather jacket, and started scowling. She turned her slouch from that of a shy person to that of a rocker who wears her guitar slung just a bit too low. She started standing at the front of the stage and doing the most talking in interviews. It was a noticeable and calculated transformation and if it seemed a bit silly and over-the-top at first, it has served her well over time. Act like a rock star long enough, do it unfailingly and well enough, and you become one. The few times I have spoken to Joan in the years since I left the Runaways, I've found it hard to recognize the Joan I met in 1975. She wears her rock star persona like a second skin. I sometimes wonder if she is even capable of taking it off. Who knows – maybe she goes home at night and coos baby-talk to her cats. I'd like to think so. I admire her for sticking to her guns and believing in herself, or at least for having the guts to "fake it 'til you make it." Most people give up in the face of adversity. Joan never did. I do have to wonder sometimes if that's the Joan that was always there hiding under the shyness and brown hair, like the butterfly hidden inside the caterpillar, or whether she had to give up a significant part of Joan Larkin in order to become Joan Jett. And if so, was it worth it or does transforming yourself like that make it impossible for a question like that even to make sense?

When I met Barack Obama, in our first year of law school, he had already put on his big-time politician act. He just didn't quite have it polished, and he hadn't figured out that he needed charm and humor to round out the confidence and intelligence. One of our classmates once famously noted that you could judge just how pretentious someone's remarks in class were by how high they ranked on the "Obamanometer," a term that lasted far longer than our time at law school. Obama didn't just share in class – he pontificated. He knew better than everyone else in the room, including the teachers. Or maybe even he knew he didn't know, but knew that the leader of the free world had to be able to convince others that he did. Looking back now I can see that he had already decided that he was a future president, and he was working hard at filling that suit. I wonder – was there a moment in his life when he did the presidential equivalent of dying his hair black and putting on a leather jacket? I'm betting there was, but he'd already done it by the time I met him. I'm sure Barack as a child was perfectly ordinary, just like Joan was. Until the moment he decided that he was a star. The Barack with whom I went to school wasn't the Barack that debuted on the national stage at the 2000 Democratic National Convention, but the president suit was already on, even if it was still too big for him. In law school the only thing I would have voted for Obama to do would have been to shut up. When he made that speech almost exactly eight years ago, I wanted to vote for him. For something, for anything. Now, as his vision of himself becomes a real possibility, though, I find that he may have filled out that suit all too well. It's hard to see the humanity underneath. Even the humor feels calculated now. And again, just like with Joan, I have to wonder – is he so focused on the goal that he has to live that persona every moment of every day? Or is he the kind of guy who can go home at night and change diapers while making poopy jokes? And if he gets elected, in eight years will he even think to wonder if it was worth it? He'll spend the rest of his life followed around by the Secret Service. How will he ever be able to take off that presidential persona without feeling entirely naked? Most of us look at the before and after pictures of U.S. president and wonder how anything that ages you that much in eight years could possibly be desirable. And yet, they seem to miss it when it's gone.

I once told someone that I felt like I wasn't special and nothing I did seemed to make a difference. He told me to stop trying to be special and, instead, to decide that I already was special and not do anything inconsistent with that. It was an effective strategy. The hard part was not to overshoot the mark and go from special to entitled. Barack and Joan seem to have adopted a similar strategy, but on a really grand scale. I just hope that they haven't overshot the mark, either. Because I really liked the Joan I knew in 1975. And Barack may just be our next president.

Vacation in Azeroth

2008-08-13T06:21:00.004-05:00

In response to those of you who've wondered where I've been, and for those who have asked, I got tired of words for a bit and decided to go live in a place where actions speak louder. Actually, I went for the ten-day free trial of World of Warcraft® and instantly became addicted, so I've spent my off-time for the last ten days or so developing a Dark Elf Warrior named Kwanyin in the Realm of Onyxia to a level 13 (gamers may laugh, but I'm doing it the slow, hard way as a solo act). She's about to take the Ferry to Darkshore, and I'm very excited.

Seriously, words do get old. I have to live in them all day at work, which is expected, but they have been getting in the way, otherwise. I've begun to concentrate on my workouts again; I can get more "spiritual awareness" from one good Yoga class or even a Step class than any dozen Buddhist Festival Board meetings, or listening to any more canned words after a session of zazen. Why is it that we feel the urge to talk, talk, talk after we sit? Wouldn't this be the best time for some silent physical activity? Will I ever get the time and resources to put together the Zen/Yoga workshop I've been thinking about for a month or two, to counter the talky talky crap from every other Buddhist activity I'm involved in? Stay tuned.

So if you must read about Zen, instead of just cutting to the chase and doing it (which is the only path that's ever going to get you anywhere/nowhere), at least read something real; I can heartily recommend Gudo Nishijima's To Meet the Real Dragon. No pansied crap there; if you see a giant pink lotus anywhere, run, run, run.

And if you want to watch something, the Witchblade TV series is out on DVD, finally.

Or come and join me in Azeroth. Very little talk (if you ignore the chat feed), lots of action. No screaming babies. Seriously, a few hours of this stuff makes me feel like I've had a real vacation. Make sure you hang in there through the map stuff at the beginning, to see how the characters look and move. So although millions of people are already doing this, I'm going to give you their trailer to watch. Maybe this'll hook you.

And don't worry, I'll find something to yak about again soon, I'm sure. I'm just as addicted to words as you are.

Doomsday

2008-08-03T07:11:00.005-05:00

Let's combine a serious prediction with some fun, OK?

It should be pretty clear by now that modern civilization as we know it is near the end. Mankind's excess of success as a species -- and Man's adamant refusal to rationally manage his environment in such a way as not to suffer the otherwise inevitable consequences of that success, i.e., destruction of his environment (via annihilation of the earth's client and the extinction of its natural resource, petroleum, which fueled his existence binge in the first place, 150 years ago or less) -- is about to lead to the end of the Industrial Age. There are many possible means of that end, which can either lead to the extinction of Man as a species, or simply his reversion to a primordial, uncivilized state. All of them can and probably will occur to some degree, and we are already seeing them, much more so that than when I first started throwing this in your face. Nuclear war is still a threat, and war in some form is inevitable. Starvation is there already, it just waits to become universal.

You know, the Powers that Be have to be aware of all this. Dick Cheney, as we've pointed out before, has been talking about Peak Oil for fifteen years. These are evil men, but not ignorant. More and more, it strikes me that they have a solution in mind for overpopulation, and for the preservation of earth's scant remaining resources for the chosen few alone, and the most efficient means to reduce the population drastically would be the controlled release of a pandemic.

Surely today's extensive research in bio-warfare has by now given them a virus that could do the job. Then all you have to do is make sure you have enough antivirus to inoculate a small segment of selected survivors, and bingo! A few more generations of livability on Planet Earth for the chosen few and their progeny. The viral weapon could be waiting, cocked and loaded at CDC in Atlanta, or in any of a thousand places.

Of course, this theme is not new; I have merely made a Robert Frost choice in this case, although mine is guided less by poetry than by rationality. And the whole idea does lead to a certain Poe-ish scenario, does it not? But it's also been done and overdone in recent fiction, as if it's become an unconscious artifact of popular consciousness, while the bodies associated with the minds in denial continue to spit out little genomes as if this were the Dawn of Eternity. Look at the whole Resident Evil series, and probably hundreds of others.

But if you're gonna dance til you drop, you should at least have fun doing it, and Doomsday, a movie released on DVD last Tuesday, set in a world where a natural(?) plague starts in Scotland, of all places (guaranteeing great dialect in the dialogue), is much more fun than most. When I started watching this movie at the theater, I was afraid I was walking into another underfunded British sci-fi knockoff, but once the protagonist, played by Rhona Mitra, is captured by punks weilding chainsaws (25 years of isolation and they have gasoline?), and then it is revealed that the punks are in contention with a medieval heraldry headed by Malcolm McDowell for control of Glasgow -- well, this one is so far over the top that you don't even look for the logical howlers any more and are free to enjoy this delightful hodgepodge of free-flowing Dystopian fantasy. Watch the preview below, then go rent it or buy it now! Then continue on with your spewing out babies and guzzling up petrol, or whatever it was you were doing.

Politics

2008-08-01T04:26:00.004-05:00

One of Hunter Thompson's most celebrated bits of genius writing came in the midst of the book many consider to be his masterpiece, Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas. He wrote circa 1971 of living in California in the '60's:

You could strike sparks anywhere. There was a fantastic universal sense that whatever we were doing was right, that we were winning...And that, I think, was the handle – that sense of inevitable victory over the forces of Old and Evil. Not in any mean or military sense; we didn't need that. Our energy would simply PREVAIL. There was no point in fighting – on our side or theirs. We had all the momentum; we were riding the crest of a high and beautiful wave...So now, less than five years later, you can go up on a steep hill in Las Vegas and look West, and with the right kind of eyes you can almost see the high-water mark – that place where the wave finally broke and rolled back.

Out of the ashes of the failed Hippie and the Peace Movement, my culturally immediate progenitors, came some of the biggest greedheads and failed bastards of all time, the people who have made America and the world what they are today; a wasteland of the dead and dying, the rich sucking off a petroleum pipe full of opium, while the populace lies starving in the desert. But for most of us without Thompson's vision, the true turning point came at the end of the year 2000.

Who would have guessed that the Doomsday Millennialists were right? All those deranged fantasists who told us that the end of the world would come in that seminal year. I did, I felt it as a sleazy, slick, sickening feeling when the U.S. Supreme Court, the American people, and yes even Al Gore himself were complicit in allowing the Bush Cabal to steal the Presidential election.

One has to ask, would it have gone down the same way, had any of us, including the Clintons, known the true horrors of what would happen in eight years of lawless tyranny? Did even Bill Clinton, who surely knew more than anyone at this point, know how America would tolerate the evisceration of its Constitution and its heart, by the soulless bastards who seized control in 2001? What would have happened at the end in November and December, 2000, if Clinton's Executive branch had seen how Congress would roll over and play dead when the present current Executive blatantly refused to follow the Constitution and the mandates of the powerless Legislature and Judiciary, and taunted it as young George must have taunted the flies whose wings he pulled off as a child?

In 2000, the Clinton administration still had control of the Executive branch, and Bill Clinton was Commander-in-Chief of the military, who I think would have been at least partially loyal to him. What if Clinton and Gore had beat the Cabal to the punch and refused to acknowledge the manipulated Supreme Court affirmation of the Bush coronation? Well, it would have been the end of our Constitutional government, for sure. It would have happened a few years earlier; how different would the results have been?

And more intriguingly, while maundering in rancid waters of useless speculation, what would Clinton and Gore have done had they known how truly heinous the Cabal would prove to be? The planes did fall out of the sky, not at midnight at the beginning of 2000, but twenty-one months later (and remember, most of the Millennialists were Christian and uneducated; the Third Millennium actually began on January 1, 2001, not a year earlier). Would Gore have rolled over and played dead, as he did, had he known, how Bush's puppetmasters would manipulate the hunger and desperation of the Middle Easterners, for their own vile ends? How the Cabal would manipulate the incipient desperation of the American public, using pseudo-patriotic hokum which would have embarrassed P.T. Barnum to lure the gullible youth of this declining empire into the jaws of death, to secure the last few remaining petrodollars for the grim old men and their sharp-tooted prodigy who now roam the corridors of power?

Would Clinton and Gore have fought back, had they known the ruthless means by which the real Evil Ones would seize the reign of power to steer the Hummer down the fatal slope into oblivion? Or what's worse, more frightening: Did they? And were they just too afraid to fight on?

I think it was all over in 2001, when Bush was inaugurated the first time. The theatre of the War on Terror which his masters created and performed nauseates me now as it did then; I refuse to revisit it further, here.

But for most of us whose hearts still beat, the final nail in the coffin came this year, when a still-gullible American public allowed Rove (or whoever is really behind him) and his instruments manipulated the sad, gullible Democrats into nominating Barak Obama, thus abandoning the last hope we had of having anyone with any pragmatic sense of responsibility, and moreover capability, anywhere near the power switch. A Hillary Clinton administration could've done, with the aid of the people and the apparatus who gave us the last successful administration in the last real American Presidency, whatever could have been done to minimize the bloodletting. The bus is already headed down the slope at breakneck speed, and nothing can be done to avert that, but it would've been nice to have a pilot who gave a shit to avoid a few trees and rocks on the way down, and would've been experienced enough to drive the thing.

Now we have an election between Tweedledum and Tweedledoofus, who will do nothing. It will be a one-term administration that begins the Plague Years. And yes, I said Plague. I'll vote for Obama, though I don't like him. But I have no hope; he's been set up to fall big before November, which is why he was hand-picked by the Cabal in the first place. But even if he wins, in some twist of manipulation that is too far away from the hand for the eye to see, he's been so compromised that he's be nothing but a scapegoat.

Tanya asked me why I don't write more about politics; this is why. I can try to show you the big picture, plain as the smirk on Bush's face or the heaps of our predecessors dying in Africa; or I can urge you to focus on developing yourself now, for what is happening, now. But the middle ground? Politics is dead. Get ready to starve and join it.

Hearing the Voices of the Land

2008-07-29T05:40:00.004-05:00

This is a picture of the Black Mesas outside of San Ildefonso Pueblo, New Mexico. I didn't take it, and I don't know who did; I had pictures from that time, but they are gone. The New Mexico period of my life was a strange time, a fog in retrospect, just one more image in a sea of images. I lived there for ten years.

At the end of the summer after my first year of law school in California, which summer spent in Nashville in 1981 concreted my resolve that I would never again return here to live, I decided to drive slowly across the country, on and off I-40, back toward Palo Alto. I spent my second night in Amarillo, Texas, and happened to check into a Quality Inn with a bar that got very lively at night, and after an evening of drinking, pool playing, and if my memory serves me correctly (which is not likely), some other chemical explorations I woke up with a blazing hangover and drove over the state border into Tucumcari, New Mexico.

The border between New Mexico and Texas at I-40 is a strange place, one of those odd junctures of the land where the scenery changes instantly -- different vegetation, different rocks, and the land comes alive. Or maybe, not alive, but brimming with ghosts. Because the Texas panhandle scarcity ends to be replaced with something very different. I stumbled into Tucumcari, a town of nothing but endless cheap motels and seedy Mexican bars, and rented a cheap room from people who spoke no English. A storm was brewing, and tumbleweeds flew down the darkened, deserted streets. I thought about braving one of the local bars but was too whipped, and settled down in the motel with a bottle of something or other. I had two phone calls to make - one to my parents in Tennessee, one to my fiancee in California, but the phones wouldn't give me a long distance line. I was enveloped in New Mexico.

The next day I had what had to be the most mystical drive of my life; with a six-pack in my lap, I drove the long, windy alternate route from Tucumcari up to Santa Fe, a highway of high desert, fields of whipping August grasses that sometime overshadowed and nearly covered the roads; occasional isolated littel towns usually consisting of nothing more than a bar and a gas station, where I refreshed my beverages, used the bathrooms and moved on. I have never had a more moving day on the road. At the end of that third day, I checked into a motel outside Santa Fe, and still tired, instead of sampling any of the good restaurants in one of the country's best restaurant cities, I drove to a Wendy's to pick up a cheeseburger. When they asked me if I wanted green chile with it, I knew that I was home.

I split my second-year clerkship between a law firm in Albuquerque and one in Los Angeles, and after graduation came back to Albuquerque. The job there didn't last; a law firm is a law firm and I was no more cut out for corporate law then, than I am now. Nevertheless, I stayed in New Mexico for ten years, times getting stranger and stranger, until ultimately I was forced back to Tennessee, where I never have felt, and never will feel that I belong.

But what drew me to New Mexico and kept me there until after all my options had run out, was the voice of the land. I could feel it so strongly in those Black Mesas pictured above, or in the bosque are where I lived in my adobe apartment in Albuquerque's North Valley. I am one-sixteenth Cherokee, but I have no real contacts with Indians (or Native Americans if you prefer, but I don't) these days, or before New Mexico. But I was drawn to the lands where they lived; there was and I'm sure still a power in those lands, a presence, a huge warm and hauntity entity that I perceived on that first day driving into Santa Fe. Some people feel it, and some don't. Living in Albuquerque was a lot like living in any other city, but I could get on my Yamaha Virago 920 and out into the land from my townhouse in ten minutes, and hear those voices again and feel the connection with the land. It was a hauting and eternal time.

After the first law firm job expired, I worked for a time in a two-man firm whose founder had fled the Department of the Interior when Reagan came in, and took up Indian law by contract. Most of our clients were Indian school Boards, particularly Navajo. During one period that lasted a few months, I was assigned to work with the Governor of Acoma Pueblo, about sixty miles out of Albuquerque, codifying legislation for the Tribe. That was a strange time. The tribal offices were mostly deserted; there was only one nearby restaurant. Like other Pueblos, Acoma had a counsel or legislature and a Governor, to satisfy the BIA and whoever else holds the leash on their funding, but the real governing is done by traditional tribal forces, structure unseen as the ghosts in the mesa, but very real -- often the real ruler of the tribe was a brujo, and old man with a broom you might see around at night when you get ready to leave the office. Shadows of reality under the veneer of a falsely imposed and plastic structure. The feeling of all those days and weeks spent in that place will never leave me, like the experience of flying out into the parched crack land where we saw fit in our greed and power to put the Navajo, towns with no employer but the schools.

I never really developed any good personal relationships with any of the Indians. Their lives were depressing to me. They lived in the shattered remnants of their own culture, which our society had largely destroyed and replaced with the worst and lowest features of our own -- the worst food, the worst entertainment, a culture stripped of value. It seemed to me that there were two extremes of person. Most of them were living only the most shallow and ignorant existence, and yet there were people of extreme depth, whose roots in their largely past-tense culture remained deep, and whose education was due to their own efforts and innate drive and wisdom, not the affect of a culture where all pretend to be educated. These truly impressive and self-made people, embodying the wisdom of their own traditions and their own will, must have been like the people who made this country for our culture, a type gone from everywhere now that the madness has taken over all.

Several times in the last couple of years, I've heard music in my bedroom from a source I couldn't locate. Several times it took the form of a very, very long soft murmur that seemed to consist of human voices, in the rhythm of a tribal chant. On sleepless nights, I would hear this music for seeming hours on end. At first I thought it came through the wall (of a different room) from the other half of the duplex I live in, but when I went to that room, there was no sound. Obviously, it came from outside. But on at least two occasions, sleepless and curious, I went outside and walked all around the house; nothing -- no sound. Until I went back to the bedroom where the chanting continued unabated. It was always gone by morning.

The neighborhood where I live is a livable ghetto, a mostly White underclass area called "the Nations." I've never known, or even thought about the source of the name, until a few weeks ago, my friend Ezra mentioned that the reason for the name was that the area hosted, a long time ago, and population of Indians, and then Indian graveyards. It took weeks for this to come together for me. But now I think I know something about the source of the chanting.

I don't believe in souls, or in ghosts, as those terms are passed on to us; those are stories which grasp at but can't enclose a deeper reality, which is ineffable but which at any rate I feel no pressure to define. What I am learning, as my life enters this latest phase, is that experience is what it is. Who were are and what 'it' is are questions which, if asked to often, obscure the reality of the world. And part of that world, for me, is hearing these voices of the land.

Incidentally, a few months ago the kid who lived in the duplex behind me was diagnosed with schizophrenia. He is gone now, hospitalized somewhere I guess. But he was hearing voices through the wall, which he thought were me, mocking and taunting him. I understand this is common for paranoid schizophrenics, and it sounds like hell. The voices he heard weren't me, but who am I to say they were unreal? Me with my Indian chanting, and that huge feeling of Presence in certain land.

As I pursue my Zen practice, I have been taught and encouraged by my teachers to trust my own experience and to accept what I perceive clearly, even when I can't define it. And one benefit of continued practice is an enlargement of the sense of self (which is also paradoxically, the absence of self) that allows a perspective on the self as if from the outside; and I see that quite justifiably in the minds of those who are enmeshed in the normal grid of social consciousness, I may be quite mad in some ways. I have no desire for most of the things people spend their lives chasing -- wealth, family, and attachments. Some of my best friends aren't even real in any "objective" sense of the world.

But when I see where your mass consciousness has taken you, and me and all of us, to the brink of extinction or purifications, depending, I don't mind. I'm quite happy with a life that some of you may see as insane; and I wouldn't give up the live I've lived, the perceptions and the feelings I've had, for any of the world that you've been building in your heads all your lives.

Have a nice day, and try to experience it as it really is.

This is me in about 1985. Already teetering on the edge of civilization.

Finally, Some Truth About Hunter S. Thompson

2008-07-20T21:35:00.006-05:00

I knew this movie was coming out, but I had no idea it would be in Nashville this fast; as it was, I was on my way out of town on Saturday afternoon before I learned, and I knew since it was playing at the local non-profit theatre, I only had a few days. I couldn't find anyone to go with me. People will sell out a theatre to see another Batman movie, but I went to see Gonzo: The Life and Work of Dr. Hunter S. Thompson alone. Not that there weren't people there, mind you, but I wondered how many were there for the right reason.

I'd been really disappointed in the HST movies to date. I'm a big fan of both Bill Murray and to a lesser extent, Johnny Depp, but both Where Buffalo Roam and Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas were for the most part pointless exploitations of Thompson's Gonzo image, Raoul Duke come to the big screen. They missed out on the important side of Thompson, the crystal-clear visionary who saw everything, including what comes next for this country and this world, and ultimately decided he'd had enough.

Those ignoramuses who know Thompson only for the darkly comedic side of his work, though not anyone who read Anita Thompson's The Gonzo Way or Thompson's oeuvre, may be surprised by the depth and width of the celebrities who considered themselves his friends. From George McGovern to Nixon speechwriter Pat Bucahanan, from Jimmy Carter to Thompson friend and benefactor George Stranahan (currently of Flying Dog Brewery) who laments that Thompson "never paid the rent, broke up my marriage, and started both my kids smoking dope," the testimonials are many, but mostly on point. And the insights into Thompson's childhood and life, although limited, are invaluable.

Of course, as Jimmy Buffett says, we miss Hunter because we need him now. Its' hard to imagine Hunter Thompson as one of today's cringing, pandering, colaborationist "journalists." We needed Dan Rather, and we need Hunter Thompson. In what may have been Thompson's last published piece, or maybe just one of the last important ones, he laments at the fall of the Twin Towers that all hope for world peace has been lost. Of course, he was right, and I think his vision was clear enough that he knew he'd done all he could do. How can we expect someone who burned so brightly, to burn forever?

I'm not going to urge you to read Thompson any more; if you haven't yet, and you're old enough to remember the sixties and seventies, there's something wrong with you. For those of you who were alive and who cared about your world, I urge you to see this movie and remember. Many of Thompson's pivotal pieces are quoted, particulary his observation that from San Francisco in the late '60's, you could see the great wave that would have changed the world, crest and roll back. Sometime there can be events in one's life that make everything after, just the anticlimax. Especially one who lives in times that he can see getting darker and darker.

Maybe it's just that I see so much of what I'd like to be in Thompson; not only his brilliance, but his absolute courage. And of course, his success. I pretend not to be envious. But there 's no doubt that his example changed my life forever. Of course he was nut, in a way, but so am I, and in lots of the same ways. I just haven't made a living at it yet.

Thompson is not the only writer whose shadow got so big it became hard to live under. Look at Jack Kerouac, who had nowhere near Thompson's talent nor intelligence. Hell, look at Hemingway, or Fitzgerald, the latter whose style Thompson so admired that he typed and re-typed The Great Gatsby just to get the rhythm of the prose.

Sometimes, when I get a little perspective, I see that maybe I'm not really all that sane or normal. But then I look around and see where we are in history, what a disaster human civilization has become, and I realize it's the sane ones, the normal ones, the ones who can live with hypocrisy, the ones who refuse to yell and thrash shoot and point at the imposters, that have put us where we are -- the Good Germans who would allow the whole world to become a mass grave of their unspoken and spineless good intentions. And I'm proud not to be among them, and I'm glad there was a Hunter Thompson, to help me do what I'll have to do, to do what has to be done. And to realize that, warts and all, to be truly human is not to be a peaceful coward, but to be truly alive.

Naked Mole Rap

2008-07-10T21:20:00.019-05:00

Deuce made me post this.

A little over four years ago, the descendants of Rufus the Naked Mole Rat entered my life. Now they control everything.

Deuce also wanted me to give you this link to his blog, though he doesn't write often...

"Post-Oil", Jim Lydecker Guest Blog

2008-07-05T17:51:00.004-05:00

I've been posting Jim Lydecker's stuff here for since May, 2007; check out the archives for the older posts . I came to realize a long way back that everything he says here is undeniably true, except for those lost in a delusional haze, or those who have a vested interest in fostering that haze in others. I got this one Thursday night and it ruined my whole evening, because this whole thing is staring us right in the face, much closer than we expected, and even the average citizen is starting to get it.

I don't necessarily agree with Jim's "solution" at the end; it would be temporary at best. No, the drain's wide open. There is no solution. Also, I don't know about the sequence of the Iraq pullout and censure in the World Court, though it's not that unlikely The OPEC cut-off is quite likely to occur as stated, as are the consequences

Thanks to Jim for keeping up on the research; I have neither the heart nor the inclination. This imminent future is why I do what I do, and why I think it's so important that it be done right. But before I take it from there, here's a dose of reality.

Greetings-

As most of you know, for the past 10 years I have been writing regularly in the Napa Valley Register. In the beginning it was mostly about national/international politics and economics.

I would probably have stuck to those themes had it not been for a hot summer day in 2004. On that day a woman I was dating and I decided to go to the Sebastiani Theatre in Sonoma where The End of Suburbia: Oil Depletion and the Collapse of the American Dream was playing. The filmmakers were in attendance and were to have a question and answer period after its showing.

I knew next to nothing of Peak Oil before the screening. However, from the credits on I absorbed every fact and quote put forth. By the end of the film it was as if a brick hit us. We were both so depressed we did not stay to meet with the filmmakers but instead went back to our apartment in silence.

I recommend this film to everyone. It started me on my path in trying to understand as much as I can about Peak Oil, resource depletion and the consequences our industrial civilization faces due to our decision to turn blindly away from the biggest crisis man will ever face.

On the Internet I found that Peak Oil was nothing new, but something the government and various institutions have been studying since the late 60s. Several of the sites that blew me away were Life After The Oil Crash (www.lifeaftertheoilcrash.net/), Wolf At The Door (www.wolf.readinglitho.co.uk/) and Die Off (www.dieoff.org/). The latter is a site that has links to several hundred government studies that provide evidence to what we are to expect to get through Peak Oil unless the overall population of the world is not reduced by 90-95%.

Looking into our future was fascinating, frightening and depressing.

On January 7, 2005, the Register published The End of the Road? To this day it remains, I believe, my most powerful essay. (It can be found at www.peakoil.com/printout3276.html.)

Three and a half years later, it is more powerful and current than ever.

However, it was just the beginning of many. Since then I have written a flurry from the Register and have had others published by the New York Times, TruthOut, the Press Democrat and various scientific and ecological/environmental journals.

Most in the beginning, such as Of Peak Oil, global warming and the economy (www.napavalleyregister.com/articles/2005/03/11/opinion/export2597.txt) and Overpopulation: Partying as the iceberg looms (www.napavalleyregister.com/articles/2005/11/11/opinion/commentary/iq_3161168.txt), were considered very negative in nature at the time. Later brought such essays such as Grim worldview from the deck of the Titanic
(www.napavalleyregister.com/articles/2007/07/01/opinion/commentary/iq_4015564.txt) and Overpopulation and Peak Oil: The perfect storm (www.napavalleyregister.com/articles/2008/01/18/opinion/commentary/doc479033ed52bb4948686565.txt) which were considered even more so.

Each essay over the years made even more dire predictions. And each prediction came true before I thought.

Examples are:

-I thought world Peak Oil production took place in November, 2005 when 2003 is now considered the accurate date.

-I originally felt Middle East would peak in 2012. We are now finding out that the Middle East, including Saudi Arabia , went over the peak in 2005.

It is not as if we were not warned. No less than such experts as Mathew Simmons, head of the world’s largest energy investment bank, have been screaming the loudest about Peak Oil since the mid-90s. Simmons is also the personal oil advisor to the Bush and Cheney families.

And hate him as most of us do, Cheney gave speeches from 1994 on warning about the soon-to-collapse supply of oil.

While I don’t consider myself an expert on oil, I am the most knowledgeable person I deal with daily on the subject.

These things I know:

-The original estimates of the world supply of crude at 2 trillion barrels were accurate. And we know we have used nearly 1.3 trillion barrels since 1851 giving us a tad less than 800 billion barrels left.

-What is left is going to be exponentially more expensive and difficult to extract.

-The world’s thirst for the stuff is about 86 million barrels a day, and increasing. (Do the math… 30 years from now and we’ll be asking, What happened?)

-The problem is not 'running out,' but when the world's demands can no longer be met.

-The only reason oil production is not increasing to keep demand from outstripping supply is that all producer’s fields, from Russia to the Middle East, are collapsing quicker than imagined.

-Every new field to be exploited is nothing more than the proverbial drop in the bucket. For example, if you could magically move all the oil left in Alaska (ANWAR included) to be used in America exclusively, we would run through it in less than 6 months.

-The decline of world oil production will affect people in more ways than any other event in human history.

As I wrote in The End of the Road:

No substance has been more interwoven into life as oil. Without it civilization will unravel. While 20-30 percent of oil is refined for gasoline, the majority is used for drugs and pharmaceuticals, fertilizers, electricity generation and everything plastic.Oil made it possible for humans to exploit resources basic to civilization in volumes never before seen. We've already depleted the Earth of its surface found, high grade resources. Those that remain need oil and high technology to be mined.

I then added:

No economy is more at risk to oil depletion than ours. Without growth we no longer can make due on the interest on our national debt.Oil depletion means economic anarchy is on the way.

Are our leaders aware of this?

In another Register essay I asked this question and wondered:

-Are our leaders blissfully totally clueless?
-Are they aware but just hoping we can get through this crisis “fingers crossed?”
-Or are they aware of the problem but know there is nothing we can do, so why disturb the masses?

My answer was all of the above though the latter now makes more sense. Last week on Face the Nation, people no less than George Will, David Broder and Jim Cramer were discussing why the price of crude is entering stratospheric levels. They said the problem has nothing to do with speculation but simply that demand outstrips supply. That, and a large unmanageable population.

All admitted they felt there is no way out.

I agree.

On every format, from the Internet to live speaking engagements to one-on-one debates, I have spoken about whether something is coming down the pike to rescue us from the demise of oil. This is not the place to dialogue this, but I am telling you, there is not.

As Matthew Simmons says:

Economists and politicians love to say once the price reaches a certain level, we will invent our way out of this. For the first time, scientists and physicists are asking, Like how?

As government studies predict, we are looking at societal and civilization breakdown around the corner. We are talking mass migrations, starvation, disease and a die-off of biblical proportions. Peak Oil will cause a sheer magnitude of problems unlike any before.

This is happening as I predicted. However, like the filmmakers of The End of Suburbia, I was dead wrong about how fast it is barreling down on us. It is literally right around the corner.

An interesting fact of interest: Back in 1997, two independent studies, one by the CIA and the other by Osama bin Laden, asked the question, At what price per barrel will the US economy be shattered?

Both arrived within two cents of each other: $176.00.

We are currently at $144 and the price seems to jump daily. Goldman Sachs, which has been incredibly accurate since the 1990s, predicts $200 before the end of the year.

$200 a barrel means over $10 a gallon of gasoline. This is only the tip of the iceberg since the price of every product we purchase is directly influenced by the price of crude.

The most oil intensive industries? Agriculture and pharmaceuticals, and they are just the beginning.

In a book I am writing, I ask what will happen if we pull out of Iraq ? My answer is that chaos will be the rule of the area with Iran taking over southern Iraq while the north will be controlled by the Turks.

We can then expect to be dragged into the World Court for war reparations, which now are estimated to be in excess of $9 trillion.

Think this is far fetched? The Bush Administration has said we are no longer compelled to answer any decision issued by the World Court . They knew this was coming.

The next step will cripple us: OPEC will cut us off and no longer accept dollars for oil. The latter will bankrupt us overnight.

Society breakdown will reign in America . Think about all the people in places like Southern California where they grow no food, have no natural resources (i.e., water) or energy. Southern California will make Somalia during the 90s look like a walk in the park.

How do we survive?

There is only one place in America to turn to and it is the place all the original titans of Peak Oil have relocated to: Oregon and Washington State .

The Pacific Northwest generates more hydroelectric power than the rest of the country combined. The Columbia River also provides enough irrigation to allow the eastern half of the states to grow enough food for themselves, and then some.

They are relatively isolated which is important to survival in a post-oil crisis. Every study on survival after Peak Oil maintains that you need to be as far away as possible from the masses.

They have small, manageable populations. (They are also educated.)

There are deep water ports offering access to the Pacific.

The two states have most natural resources necessary to allow an economy, though contractive, to exist without serious disruption to the standards of living.

The one resource they do not have? Oil.

The simple answer to this is: Strike a deal with Alaska . Oregon and Washington would provide Alaska with food Alaska can not grow in exchange for oil they do not have.

How would you defend the Pacific Northwest from the rest of the nation where societal collapse will ensue? You bring back the troops from the Middle East and have them defend their borders.

Is this outlandish? Absolutely.

But just a decade ago no one thought about the collapse of the world’s supply of crude oil. As we head into the era without oil, the only rule that will be followed is chaos.

Friends of mine ask if speculation in oil futures is worth considering and my answer is yes, you will make money.

But if you want to invest in your future, my answer is, Go Northwest.

Do you, your family and loved ones a favor and buy some land near Portland or Seattle .

Jim Lydecker
Napa, California
July 3, 2008

Nashville Zen Center Jukkai Ceremony

2008-07-01T21:25:00.004-05:00

I monitor the hits on this site through a free tool called Google Analytics, and I notice that a lot of people have been looking at my last post. It's quite possible that a lot of those hits are from people who are associated with the Nashville Buddhist Festival, and they quite probably consider themselves slammed by that post. That's unfortunate, because those are all really well-meaning people, and you certainly could do worse that to practice with any of the groups associated with the NBF. Perhaps I need to learn the lesson implied by the name my teacher Taiun Michael Elliston gave to my friend Ana at her initiation Saturday, Annin, which means something like "patient forbearance."

But you know, when something is important, it deserves to be done right. Which is what we did Saturday. I do indeed feel that the Nashville Zen Center was reborn Saturday, and was reincarnated in the way that it needed to go. If you missed the previous post, go read it; what I said we'd do, we did.

There were lots of great things about our half-day sit, followed by our Jukkai ceremony. Probably the best thing was the way I feel about this group of people. We were supported by some of our other members who either haven't chosen to go the initiation route, or had been initiated otherwise; and best of all, by some of the "old" Nashville Zen Center members whom I hadn't seen since schisms hit us right after I started there. Lisa and Patsy, from One Dharma, a group that splintered from the old NZC in 2005, and now has dwarfed us in size; Bill, the founder of the NZC, from 1982! And Jeff was there, and a host of others; a picture below includes a lot of these people, without whom we would not be who we are now. We are immensely grateful for their support.

And thanks to our families and friends. From my point of view, thanks to Stephanie, and to Ana's mother and sister, and all the other friends and relatives who really didn't know what was happening but knew there was a good thing there.

This blog entry has no rhetorical point. I just wanted to share with you my good feeling, and the conviction that something right has happened. And my thanks to everyone involved. And to invite you to join us. Because words can't describe the benefits of what I'm talking about. And I'm failing miserably at trying, so I'll just let you look at these great pics from Nat's wife Kathy. You can see them all here, by the way. More later.

Buddhism®

2008-06-24T01:15:00.008-05:00

Tonight, I was exhausted. Maybe it was that really good Yoga class I did last night, or maybe it was the fact that my job has become so stupefying I can barely make it through the days. And then on top of it all, my Buddhist practice, which is my point of reference when everything else become intolerable, is so infested with bullshit these days that I'm tempted to clear it all out and start over.

But I was exhausted, and whereas when I'm in that frame of mind, in the old days I would have probably got drunk, passed out and woke up about this time (1 a.m.) with a hangover, last night I had a salad and a barbequed chicken breast, read as much really good sci-fi as I could stand, and went to sleep about 7 p.m. Go figure.

When I did wake up, I found Brad Warner's latest Suicide Girls article. Go on, read it, it's free, especially if you're Buddhist. If I had stayed in California where I started sitting zazen about twenty-seven years ago, I might feel like he does about institutional Buddhism.

Bonnaroo, ten days ago (sob!) did for me what I hoped it'd do; it cleared some of the bullshit out of my head and let me reconnect with a part of my "self" that I was missing, the one that liked to stand in a field in Manchester, TN, and scream "Bullshit!" at the world, all done of course with a beer in my hand and some really good music. On the other hand, it made me want to call a spade a spade, and that makes it really hard to go to work and pretend to be someone I'm not (or more accurately, to refuse to admit who I really am), and on top of all that to deal with Buddhism®.

You've heard all this before, but for some reason, at the two times in my life I've really felt drawn back toward Buddhism, I've had trouble finding it. The first time was in Albuquerque, where now there is a big Albuquerque Zen Center apparently (Rinzai), but when I was there I had trouble finding anything authentic and instead wound up with Nichiren Shoshu for a few years. The second time was in Nashville in 2004, when I did find the Nashville Zen Center. When I discovered the NZC, I had hoped it was a source for connecting with real Zen. I was motivated to come back to Zen by Brad's first book, Hardcore Zen. I think the preface of that book -- Brad's basic "philosophical" questions, the "What is This?" which is the basis for all real philosophical, existential inquiry, was the same as mine. I just needed to find people of a like mind.

My frustrations with the Nashville Zen Center have been well-documented, and I won't reiterate them here. In the spring of 2006 I went to Atlanta to the Atlanta Soto Zen Center and found what I'd been looking for. I found a teacher who insisted on staying with what I feel to be the true essence of Zen, and of existence; the essential staring down the void which is the self. And he/they was/were still able to do that essential thing within the context of a semi-formal, mostly dignified Zen practice. I made that connection and it's the best thing I've done since my life changed when my mother died in 2003. I will not refute it.

This coming Saturday, Michael Elliston, Abbott of the ASZC, is coming to Nashville to conduct a Discipleship ceremony for my friend and NZC president Nat, and to initiate some really great people into formal Buddhism. These people are people I'm thrilled to share the experience with, people who were drawn to Zen of their own accord. Paul and Ana, you are two of my favorite people (you too, Michelle and Walter). The ceremony will take place after a half-day sit at the new 12South Dharma Center, which is a cooperative effort among several Nashville Buddhist groups and a kind of dream space (with problems, of course). So why am I not happy?

In my efforts to bring what I find to be real, essential Buddhist practice to Nashville, I have of necessity found myself among the purveyors of Buddhism®. To do what I had to do, I myself had to become visible and prominent in the Buddhist® community, which is something I never wanted to do, and now I'm paying for it.

See, I would never want to be a visible leader of any Buddhist group I'm a part of. I've got too much baggage, for one thing. For another, I have, of my own design, very little tolerance for bullshit, and that's not what you want in the occupant of a position which becomes, in some sense, political. I just want to sit on the sideline and throw these japes in. Unfortunately, in this case I had to help create the thing that was there to throw the japes at. Hence the dilemma.

Last year, I and representatives from four other Buddhist groups conducted the very successful Fourth Nashville Buddhist Festival. You've read all about it. It went well, and it made me a lot of friends, and I was happy with it. Unfortunately, this year I'm still on the Board of that, and I don't like it any more. Can't stand it, in fact. I got them incorporated, but I'm done with it. They want to do the same thing as last year, and I never do see the point in that. Introducing the Buddhist-curious in Nashville to some options. For some of the groups, it's a recruiting tool.

Yes, people can be recruited to Buddhism, just like any other religion, or any other -ism, for that matter. Because, see, people want that. That's what religion is all about, isn't it? The desire to find people of like-minded belief. To gain a purpose larger that oneself. To mutually reassure one another that, yes, despite, the vicissitudes of this life, Life has a bigger meaning, and everything will be OK in the end. God or the Buddha will take care of you. I'm OK, you're OK. Horseshit.

Because my Zen practice has nothing to do with that. Zen is about confronting reality. Michael Elliston and 90% of the ASZC members I've practiced with (of course, I only tend to meet the serious ones, at the retreats) understand that. Brad Warner certainly understand that. And I choose these people to be my teachers. Don't think I'm in any way refuting my authentic Zen practice here. I have found, in my sitting on my cushion, a lifetime practice. Something that always comes back to the real. Something I won't give up. And the only sincere Zen practitioners I've ever met came to Zen on their own. Wandered in off the street, as it were. You can't recruit people to the real question; they must have it, to start.

I've been told by my teachers and by people who've been sitting zazen for a long time, that once you've done it for a while, everything you do is Practice. It took me until now to understand that. Because now, not sitting zazen is also Zen practice. Bonnaroo was practice, definitely. Writing another vitriolic blog entry with a Red Bull® at 2 a.m. is also practice. Knowing I have another mind-numbing work day to follow, followed by a refreshing NZC meeting tonight, is also practice.

And sitting in a room with a bunch of delusional religiosos who happen to call themselves Buddhists instead of Christians is also practice. I'm talking about the Board of Directors of the Nashville Buddhist Festival, not the NZC (the latter being, in its present incarnation, made up of quite sincere people). And there are some NBF Board members whose practices I admire, and in fact consider teachers. But in a group setting, it all makes me puke. Because at this point I may as well be on the Board of the Southern Baptist Convention.

And now of course there's the informal committee set up for running the Dharma Center, which is made up mostly of the same people. Good people, good intentions, more bureaucracy. I'm not made for Bureaucracy. I'm made for sitting in a field at dawn with a beer in my hand. That's existential realization. That's Practice, too.

So for now I have to stay with the Bureaucracy for a little while longer. Pretty soon I'm gonna get off all these committees. Maybe someone else will take my place, now, maybe not. But for now it's the place in which I've put myself and I have to deal with it. I should be typing the minutes of the last Nashville Buddhist Festival Board meeting right now, instead of bitching about it. Hopefully I'll get that done, sometime.

Photo courtesy of Paul Felton, Shambhala Nashville®.