Anyone Can Comment, Now

Anyone could always comment, here, but now you can do it without establishing a Blogger (or Google) identity. So I'm going to have to moderate them, to keep from being spammed to death. This was done in response to people telling me that they were having trouble, or were just unable to comment. I never understood this, but anyway...

This is an experiment. Don't let me down.

Never Apologize, Never Explain

The last week of October, I took a little vacation. I took my dad, who is 85, to Galveston, TX, where my parents were married after WWII and where I scattered my mother's ashes in the ocean in 2004. It was great, of course; I found the house from where my parents moved when they moved to Tennessee in 1951, and my dad found one of his previous co-workers from the Southern Select Brewery, which became the Falstaff Brewery in Galveston, from the same period. That guy is now rich, 89, and claims to still drag race. Go figure.

Of course I did some reading while I was there. The first book I read, but probably the most important, was The Gonzo Way by Anita Thompson, Hunter's wife upon his death in 2005. Hunter Thompson's life, like his writing, never fails to inspire me. Unfortunately most of the material on Thompson's life we get presented with, emphasizes his drug use and violence, which was certainly never the main focus of his oeuvre. What Thompson had, amazingly considering all what for most of us would have been extreme chemical distortion, was a dead-on awareness and intuitive perception of exactly what was going on, and he seems to have had it pretty much all the time. Luckily for us he had spent his life developing his skills as a writer and went on to create a new genre to express what he saw. He was also unerringly a man of his convictions who did not hesitate to speak what he saw.

Anita's book on her late husband is a strange little book. It is only about 100 pages long, and she does not attempt a biography of Thompson. More than anything else it seems to be her attempt to distill what she learned from the last few years of his life which she spent with him into lessons. The lessons should be a lesson to us all; they are:

Lesson 1: Learning - That's What It's All About.

Lesson 2: It's Wrong When It Stops Being Fun.

Lesson 3: Politics is the Art of Controlling Your Environment.

Lesson 4: "We" is the Most Important Word in Politics.

Lesson 5: Truth is Easier.

Lesson 6: Buy the Ticket, Take the Ride

Lesson 7: Never Apologize, Never Explain.

My trip to Galveston in 2004 was at a time of intense transformation for me, dealing with the death of my mother, stepping out to get a fresh perspective, and deciding which people and factors in my environment to keep and which to let go. Less than a month later, I returned to Zen after over twenty years, and began seeking a community of people with similar interests. I have found some very good people during those few years, but much of what I see disappoints me. I feel that to benefit from a genuine attempt to confront reality, one much approach that attempt with the desperation of a man with his hair on fire looking for water. For the most part, I discover weekend warriors. Of course this should not deter me from my own effort, but I find myself getting sidetracked. I must continue my own effort regardless of what others do.

And inspired by Hunter Thompson, for the millionth time, I must be true to what I perceive and speak what I feel. Some people may be offended. But that's why I started this blog a couple of years and a hundred entries ago, wasn't it?

Ghost in the Shell - Solid State Society

Click the image on your left for the trailer!

In the few years I've been watching anime, I've never found anything I liked quite so well as the Ghost in the Shell series. The anime are based on the incredible manga by Masamune Shirow, of whom a good bibliography can be found at that link. Although Shirow has said that he considered the Appleseed series (which led to the anime film of the same name, the latter version of which was my favorite anime before the instant Ghost film) to be his main work, he is best known for the Ghost in the Shell works.

Without recapping all the material in the bibliography, Ghost in the Shell came out in 1995 and was the first anime to really blow my head off. I usually don't like any kind of fiction where cops are the heroes, but this stuff is the exception. Section 9 is a near-future police / "anti-terrorist" force staffed mostly by cyborgs, humans who have made most of their body parts replaced, or have entirely cybernetic bodies. Its protagonist is Major Motoko Kusanagi, a brooding, beautiful cyborg who turns out to be one of the most enigmatic, fascination heroes in science fiction. At the end of the original movie, Motoko blends with its villain, the Puppet Master, and disappears into the net. There is a sequel manga to the first volume, and a beautiful sequel film from 2004 (which take place in different universes, and don't follow the same plot line). For some reason the version of Ghost in the Shell 2: Innocence released here has no dub and you'll have to deal with the subtitles (if anyone hasn't figured it out yet, this stuff is all originally Japanese....), but it's well worth the experience.

To confuse you further, the Ghost in the Shell: Stand Alone Complex TV series by Kenji Kuriyama, doesn't follow the plot lines of any of the above, but takes place in a universe where Motoko never left Section 9 but continues at the helm. It ran two seasons and has to be the most complex, intelligent thing I've ever seen in the guise of a TV show; it makes me wonder if the Japanese audience isn't a lot more sophisticated than the American, which come to think of it wouldn't be hard.

The new film is simply the most beautiful, exciting and elegant entry in the whole opus so far. It seems to have been done in lieu of a third season of SAC, and it reputedly set a budget record for an anime TV movie; the money shows in the production. Get ready to fall in love with Motoko all over again. If you thought the second season of SAC got too talky, this is the antidote for it - lots of action.

When William Gibson inadvertently invented what became known as cyberpunk in the 'nineties, he created or uncovered a huge fanbase for an art form that barely existed. He admits that his own skills as a writer were limited at that point, although that early stuff, with its heroes like Case and especially Molly the razor girl, still fascinates me, and I'm not alone. Most of the "cyberpunk" that followed was garbage, including a lot of stuff by Gibson's friend and unfortunate collaborator, Bruce Stirling, that I really, really tried to like. But occasionally you get a genius like Shirow, whose knowledge shows through in every page of the manga, down to the footnotes (and whose vision, like Gibson's, foreshadowed and doubtless influenced our current cybernetic reality). This is the real stuff, and Shirow (and Kuriyama), like Gibson, will never insult your intelligence).

What I'm saying is, go get Ghost in the Shell - Solid State Society now; but if you haven't seen its precursors first, you should. See the two other films in order followed by both series of SAC. And you really ought to read all the manga; the go for Appleseed, followed by Shirow's other works. It'll be the best anime time you ever spent. If you're not into anime, you will be after this, or you just don't get it. But this is philosophical stuff, and it does require a modicum of knowledge about what has come to be known as cyberspace. It's not for kids.

And kind of a big footnote: The more Ghost in the Shell I watch, the more I identify with Batou, the brooding (yes, him too) cyborg who is Motoko's partner. I just read a great book, After the Long Goodbye, which takes place in the universe of the original movies, after Motoko is gone, and stars Batou. Now, novelizations are crap, but this book is by noted sci fi auther Masaki Yamada, and is a piece of literature in its own right. It is the story of Batou's quest for his lost bassett hound, and it is also an interesting mediation on the essence of humanity, strongly flavored by Japan's Buddhist backdrop (and its modern, atheist one as well). You won't be disappointed, in any of this.

Sit Down and Shut Up!

I don't know why it took me so long to get around to reading Brad Warner's second book, Sit Down and Shut up. Maybe it was because I was so involved with the Buddhist Festival to even think about reading a Buddhist book in my free time, or maybe it was because I've been following Brad's blog and his columns for Suicide Girls for so long now that I thought I'd heard everything he had to say. Which I have, really, but still, reading this book over the last week has been a breath of fresh air, reaffirming my commitment to Zazen, as opposed to Buddhism, and blowing out all the smoke from all the other schools of Buddhism (and beyond - more to come!) I've been saturated with the last few months.

I will always consider Brad to be one of my Zen teachers, despite the fact that I've only met with him, and sat zazen with him, for the three-day sesshin known as the Empty Well here, near Nashville, which opened my eyes as to the unreliability of the Nashville Zen Center as any kind of vehicle to furthering my own practice. It was Brad's first book, Hardcore Zen, that brought me back to Zen just when I needed it. At the end of 2004, following a year and a half of tumult that completely uprooted what little previous life I had developed since my return to Tennessee in 1993, I was seriously looking for some sort of "spiritual" practice, which I knew from experience I needed to anchor the new identity I was establishing. I had known that I was a Buddhist since about 198o, but I had burned through Nichiren Shoshu back in the 80's and hadn't stayed with a practice since. In 2004 I was looking at Tibetan Buddhism, but it wasn't working for me; the people were great, but I was getting nothing out of the practice (although I'm told the true nature of their practice was something esoteric that hadn't yet been "revealed" to me). Then I found Hardcore Zen, and I knew I had come home.

If you haven't read Hardcore Zen, you owe it to yourself to do so, whether or not you are inclined to Buddhism. You certainly can't learn Buddhism from a book, so the best Zen book is the one that makes you want to sit zazen, period. And this was it for me. Much has been made of Brad's punk rock background, but I think what really brought me back to Zen was his writing voice. He speaks clearly and directly, without the sanctimony of most Buddhist writers. If his writings don't appeal to you, you are nothing like me.

Of course, sitting with Brad as a teacher is not quite like reading his books. He is actually very respectful of Soto Zen forms, and he is not a sarcastic jackass like you might expect. He is in fact a very nice guy. If you've read my Empty Well blog, you know that only a handful of us experienced the weekend sesshin with him. Nat and I had a great sit, got to know Brad and his wife Yuka, and learned a lot. I don't know about anyone else. Of course, I was embarassed by the NZC's failing to show, en masse, but I bet Brad doesn't even remember, or at least most times I hope not.

Anyway, the Brad Warner of Sit Down and Shut Up is a lot more like the Brad with whom we sat, than the younger Brad Warner of Hardcore Zen. This book is a lot more about Zen, and is in fact a very readable first approach to the Shobogenzo, the main book if there is one, of Soto Zen (the most-utilized, and most readable, translation of which, is, by the way, by Brad's teacher Gudo Nishijima and his student Chodo Cross). This time, Brad uses his recent activities, including a reunion of his band Zero Defects (0DFx) and his work on his movie Cleveland's Screaming, as a backdrop. But this book as opposed to the first, is less punk, more Zen, as probably befits Brad's emergence as a teacher. This is a more mature Brad Warner. I read somewhere online that Brad has been chosen as Nishijima's successor to lead the Dogen Shangha, which event prompted attacks from jealous fellow students, especially targeting Brad's column on Suicide Girls (which I happen to love -- the column and the site in general).

I don' t know about you, but I get saturated with bullshit. I am extremely grateful to Nat for "volunteering" me for the Nashville Buddhist Festival this year; I got a lot out of it, including learning how to build a real website (albeit still with templates), and mostly I met a lot of great people, who practice all sorts of Buddhism, and beyond. I'm not saying that the practices of the other schools of Buddhism are bullshit; they're just not my practice. But then I got a little further afield, and that field is wide open! And then, with the same impeccable timing that Hardcore Zen came to me to bring me back to my original practice of zazen, Sit Down and Shut Up came back to remind me that I am in fact a Soto Zen Buddhist, of a fairly non-eclectic mindset. No enlightenment machines or hypnotic treats for me! No blunt-puffing Shamans for Zen teachers! (What, you say? More to come in a future blog entry!)

Thanks for the Reminder

I apologize for once again spending too much time on this blog on local Buddhist issues, especially since most of you probably have no clue what I'm talking about, and what's more don't care. Plus it probably does no good for me or anyone else for me to spend time and cyberspace ripping well-meaning people for their ineptitude. As for Nashville Buddhism, I'm not a Buddhist teacher and have never claimed to be, so I think it's time for me to follow Brad's advice and Sit Down and Shut Up. I need to spend more time on my own personal practice and less on non-existent Buddhist "politics." In future entries, I will spend some time and some stuff that's worked for me, now and in the past, and leave other people alone. At least I'll try, thought there's this one local group just begging for a parody...

Anyway. I ran across this article this morning, and it reminded me why I started the Ratzaz Diaries, almost two years and one hundred entries ago. John McCain, who once appeared to be a man of integrity and clarity compared to the Bush Cabal, then sold his soul and his credibility in his efforts to appeal to brain-dead Bush supporters, has once again branded himself as the kind of doofus who shouldn't be anywhere near a position of political responsibility in American. The fact that he's still better than the creatures who are in control now is a moot point, though a scary one. Luckily, he seems to have permanently alienated the kind of thoughtless, history-free moron who might be wooed by the position he sets forth, apparently in Beliefnet, that only Christians should be allowed to assume the permanently soiled mantle of the U.S. Presidency.

Early on in the Ratzaz Diaries, I took a radically anti-Christian position. That position was based on my personal situation at the time. Since then, I have definitely mellowed on the subject; in a world in which a huge portion of humanity has given up on any positive or redeeming principles at all, the sincere Christians are trying to do what they believe is right. Yes, I still think that their underlying beliefs are delusional and pretty much flat-out insane, in the face of the modern world; but I also think that since we are all marching toward the same oblivion as a civilization, that Christians, like morphine addicts, can be forgiven their escape hatch. My own different path is based on an insistence on confronting and accepting reality, but not everyone will find that either desirable or possible, when the bullet meets the bone (to quote Golden Earring).

Also, a word to you well-meaning soles who have argued, in the spirit of Thomas Merton, that all religions come together on the highest level: perhaps. When one is speaking, say, of a Trappist monk and a Tibetan monk who have each spent thirty years in silent meditation, I am quite wiling to believe that the state they have entered is the same. I've never been there, and probably won't get there. I still think ultimately one has to drop off the sense of the Other, whether that be God, Jesus or Buddha, before one finds the selfless Self. But that's too much for this post.

The issue is, that's not the Christianity John McCain is talking about, or that his follower would identify with, if he still has any. I think that their Christianity is more like that of the man who inspired me to begin the Ratzaz Diaries in October, 2005 (and to quit my job less than three months later). That man was the manager of the company I worked for at the time, and he used to come in every day, whacked out of what was left of his mind on prescription drugs, puffing and snorting, full of his daily dose of reality from Fox News. Probably his major disease was an obsessive homophobia, which I have always taken to be a symptom of closeted gay urges, and I couldn't take one more day of this moron ranting about "queers." His second obsession was his own Christianity; he was a lifelong Catholic, and I believe his beliefs are quite sincere; he claims to have many friends of other religions and to approve of all of them (though he never could wrap his cloudy head around a religion without a God), yet at the same time he would insist that the United States was a Christian country, founded by Christians, and should stay that way.

By the way, this man was in many ways a very well-intentioned human being. I think he very much wanted to be my friend, and in a way he was and still is. He spent hours fixing my computer when I dumped the hard drive, and was probably the easiest person to work for imaginable, if you could ignore the bombasts. So this is really about how dumb beliefs (and Fox News) can poison a good person who does not have a sufficient defense against institutionally promulgated ignorance.

Now anyone with a real history book or an inquisitive mind knows that, while doubtless the earlier settlers of the Americas were in fact primarily Christians - under pain of death to be, many of them - the Constitution was a child of the rational European mind of the eighteenth century, and was written primarily by Deists and atheists. In its flawed brilliance, the United States Constitution was probably the greatest document ever to emerge from a committee, foreshadowed perhaps by the Magna Carta and the Declaration of Independence, but the first indication of the dominance of the rational mind over the Western civilization of the next two centuries. It is a document that most of the world does not have the cultural background to understand or appreciate, which the morons who now run this "Christian" nation ignore when they try to foist the child of Western rationalism among Islamic fundamentalists or Asians whose traditions all come from monarchy or dictatorship.

When the civilization of which we have been fortunate enough to have experienced the peak and best is gone; when in the next few generations the total of the accomplishments of mankind has been wiped out by the inevitable consequences of mankind's obsessive, self-replicating, mindlessly spawning and all-consuming nature; will there still be copy of the U.S. Constituition left anywhere, as a paeon to our best and brightest moments? Indeed, in this age of the renaissance of blindness, ignorance and fanaticism, of civilizations's last grasping moments, will the clarity and hope of this country's founders survive even one more term of the Supreme Court, or one more lie from the mouths of its evil, corrupt and morally bankrupt leaders?

So, yeah you could do a lot worse than sincere Christianity. Sincere anything is at a a premium now. But thanks again to John McCain for the reminder of the well-meaning man who taught me the meaning for all time of one of the Boddhisattva vows: Fear, hatred, and ignorance rise endlessly. I vow to abandon them.

Puffy - "Oriental Diamond"

I was all bummed out, then I found this video on Brad Warner's Hardcore Zen blog. Stole it straight off there, as a matter of fact. If this doesn't make you happy, there's something wrong with you!

In the wake of the huge success of the Buddhist Festival, the group I sit with, the Nashville Zen Center, seems to be a dead sangha walking. People come to sit on Saturdays, but won't affiliate with a good teacher and continue to seek one bad one after another, or insist that they can practice Zen Buddhism without a teacher. And actually going to sesshin is out of the question. Ah, well. I am tired of trying to push a rope.

It's good to know that when life gets you down, there are cute Japanese girls dressed as ... what?

Hey, are these Fuzzies?

It's Always Brightest Just Before Dusk

Everyone here in Nashville knows that the 2007 Nashville Buddhist Festival was a huge success. I'm really only announcing that here for those of you who follow this blog from out of the area, so you aren't left hanging by all the build-up. Likewise, I'm not going to recap all the mutual congratulation that's been going on; our shoulders are dislocated from slapping ourselves on the back.

In truth, I think it's quite possible that this year's Festival may be a watershed for the Buddhist community in Nashville. You can check out lots of pics on our website, and you can still buy a t-shirt; likewise, the new NBF Yahoo group has, in Lisa's words, populated quickly and is becoming active. All the existing groups are reporting spikes in membership, attendance and activity, and I think the two newest ones, One Dharma and the Nashville Mindfulness Center, are going to explode. The Nashville Zen Center will probably continue to consist of grumpy old farts, for the most part.

What interested me the most about this years's Festival was the edge of darkness I heard in some of the dharma presentations. From the Venerable Bhante Nyanasobhano, we heard the Buddhist version of fire and brimstone (you don't want to be on your deathbed having failed to strive for enlightenment, and I paraphrase both these teachers). The most interesting moment of the Festival to me occurred when my own Zen teacher, Rev. Taiun Michael Elliston was asked what he thought of "human advancement". His response was "Human advancement? I don't see much human advancement going on today. It appears at this point that humanity is a virus which is killing its host, which makes what we are doing with our Zen practice all the most important. It is important that we strive with our practice to deal with this reality, and that we do it quickly."

That's not exactly what he said; someone has a tape, but I don't, and I don't have that kind of memory. But the key moments in my Zen practice, especially these last three years, is that I keep hearing things from the mouths of my teachers that correspond exactly to what I have perceived to be true through my own practice and understanding, and which makes it obvious to me, that for me, I have found the right practice, and the right teachers.

The morning before the Festival, I read a news article that informed me that the fabled Northwest Passage, a myth which inspired much of the early exploration of this continent five hundred years ago, is now a reality. You can now sail between the Atlantic and the Pacific through the polar waters. Guess why. Some fool will probably think this is a boon for shipping and commercial mankind. Read my lips people, this is indeed the Kali Yuga, and it's going to be shorter than we thought.

Yes, in the backlash from the Festival of Goodness and Light, Ratzaz is stirring. Those of you who have become fans of this blog may not remembers its early days, almost two years ago; the archives are still there.

Someone on the new NBF board just posted that they were afraid that their meditation practice would piss off Jesus. Ratzaz, the true Dark Lord, is shimmering in the depths.

Thanks to Allison Stillwell for the excellent photograph of Michael Elliston. More of her beautiful work can be found on the NBF website.

False Advertising

OK, we haven't really sunk this low. Click on the pic for the real info.

The Truth Is at Your Door

Surely, with the summer we've just had, and the hurricane season just kicking in, no one is doubting global warming anymore. But I'm learning not to overestimate the stubborn ignorance of the American public.

In a half-hour update on the DVD of An Inconvenient Truth, Gore and crew not only update the film's hard data for the year after filming (which was initially done at the time of Katrina), but include a minute or two of footage omitted from the film. The most telling segment is a few seconds of film which introduces the portion of the released movie in which Gore points out the explosion of population growth in the last few years (the number has doubled since I first heard the population of the earth quoted as 3 billion when I was a child). In the recently released intro, Gore's graph begins 160,000 - 195,000 years ago, the current scientific estimate of when modern man appeared on earth. Gore intro's that segment by saying, and I misquote, "I'm always a little reluctant to get into this, they had a little trial down in my home state..."

Realizing that An Inconvenient Truth was edited to avoid offending Creationists gave me a little giggle, but it also led me to understand that the people who doubt global warming, a.k.a. the climate crisis, especially now, are probably the same people denying evolution. Unfortunately, we are in an age in which the rules of Darwin have been abated by the rule of the masses; the best no longer reproduce most successfully, and it will not just be Creationists and the proponents of denial who die in the disasters and plagues to come in the next few years.

As to the film itself, it is indeed a must-see. The first thing I realized when I saw this was that Gore in one sense missed his calling; the man would have been the best college professor you never had. The core of the film is a lecture Gore has given repeatedly, he says over a thousand times and I'm sure a lot more now, about his passion. I will say that it's one of the clearest, most palatable popularized science lectures I've ever seen. With a few forgivable abbreviate leaps of logic, there is no bad science here. And the facts here are facts you should know. As focused as I've become on similar topics in the last year or so, there's a lot here I needed to learn. We're pretty much at the point where if you don't know this material, you're not doing your duty as a citizen of the planet.

The strangest thing about his film, though, is the way the producers have chosen to break up the lecture. Alright, as we see in the update, ninety minutes of straight lecture, even with nifty aids, film and animation, can be a bit dry; but the filmmakers have chosen to intersperse with the lecture segments bits about Al himself. some of which are tangential at best to the thesis of the movie. OK, the bits about his purely personal life are understandable, OK and kind of interesting, especially to a native Tennessean such as myself. It's the bits about Gore's political career, especially the 2000 election, which seem out of place and are a bit annoying. I mean, yes we all know that the Bush cabal, just then coming into its own, stole that election; but while yes, there is very much a relationship between that coup and the current government's policy of ignorance and exacerbation of the world's climate woes, those clips do seem a bit irrelevant and self-serving, as presented out of context. I have to wonder if it was Gore's people. or film editors wanting to ensure the popluarity to the movie by touching all the bases, who included these parts. It doesn't matter; it just comes across as odd.

The main change of impression upon my consciousness from this film was its timeline. It still seems to me that global warming is a symptom of a deeper disease. Gore would agree with this; he states in the coda that it's a symptom of a problem of man's relationship with the planet. This is obvious, but it's a dangerous step backward from reality toward philosophy. Elsewhere, Gore indicates the causes of the climate crisis as overpopulation and technology. True, I guess, but this ignores the fact that the two are inextricably interwoven; we certainly would not have this population explosion without technology, and the technology, as ignored in the film, is going to die when the oil runs out. We will be left with a planet chock full of ill-prepared humans dying of disease, hunger and war. Gore actually seems to satisfy himself with the prediction that the human population will top out, according to current trends, around nine billion! He attributes this to a changing culture of birth and family size on a worldwide basis. I say it's still about rats in a cage. When the cage is full, they pretty much stop breeding.

So if I'm faulting Gore for anything here, it's his optimism. More than anything, what An Inconvenient Truth brings to my attention is that we may indeed die of climate factors before the oil completely runs out and the three factors I mentioned kick in at full bore. Still, if the human race really wanted to survive, they would not only shift to alternative energy sources as soon as possible (and this would help with both the peak oil and climate crisis "problems", obviously), but they would do so with a controlled population reduction. Which is of course a prospect as scary as the problem, if you're one of those whose personal population is to be reduced to say, zero). So which is worse, the problem or the solution? It depends on whether you want anyone to be able to read this blog, or see An Inconvenient Truth, fifty years from today.

As for me, I think that realistically what we have to do is accept reality and just prepare to actually face it, and yes, those are two very different things. Your life, you choose.

Yoga for the Kali Yuga

When it became obvious that the Board for the Buddhist Festival was floundering in the dark when it came to someone to do yoga for this year's event, it became time for me to become reacquainted with my favorite yoga teacher from a couple of years ago, Leah Lillios. Leah recently opened her own studio, Kali Yuga Yoga, in east Nashville, and I'd been putting off checking it out for months; luckily, the Festival's problem became my gain, and not only did I secure Leah's and Kali Yuga's participation for the Festival, I found a great alternative for my own yoga practice.

Strangely enough, part of my hesitation came from the fact that although I've been doing yoga since 2000, this is the first time I'd ever been to a private studio. I'd started at the Y, and although as we all know I hate the YMCA, it's just too easy to keep going there once you have that relatively cheap membership and that habit. Not that there aren't still great yoga classes at the Y; they still have the fitness market cornered in Nashville, due to their unconstitutional violation of the separation of Church and State for tax purposes, and it's probably the only place left to get a decent step aerobics class.

But when I started at the local Y in 1997, after they'd helped force the failure of the excellent private workout place I'd been using for a couple of years since moving to Nashville, they didn't even dare call it yoga! They had to call the classes relaxation classes. See the picture of Leah above, and how relaxing that looks? But remember, the Y is a Christian organization, and although I can quite easily visualize Jesus doing yoga, I can't image Jimmy Swaggart or any of his modern clones doing it, and it was perceived as un-Christian. This seems to have changed by the time I started at the Green Hills Y, three years later, as part of my self-prescribed physical therapy after a car wreck.

Anyway, I think those cranky old farts were right, years ago. To me, yoga represents a lot of things, like the unity of body and mind, and finding the universe within oneself, that are antithetical to the life-condemning, dualistic thinking that is Christianity. So if the body is evil and a cage for the soul, and we're just waiting to die to go to a better place, why work out at all, I wonder? There are still a few scourges left, I'm sure.

Anyway, that's got nothing to do with Leah or Kali Yuga. For all I know, everyone that goes there is a closet Mormon. The point is, I enjoy doing yoga more when I'm not in the fake, smarmy environment of the Y, and the Kali Yuga studio is a great place to start. Although Leah's background as I understand it, began with hot yoga (which I avoid, because I sweat a lot and it's all hot yoga to me), I started doing vinyasa (flow) classes with her at the Cool Springs Y in 2004, and that's the basis of the Kali Yuga Yoga Club, which meets at 6:30 on Wednesday nights. That's the discounted ($5) class that also serves as the nexus for the Club, which also participates in events like our Buddhist Festival. It would also be great for beginners, because Leah works with people as they need it, and questions are encouraged, unlike most yoga classes.

One of the first things to attract me to the whole idea of Kali Yuga Yoga was its name. Most religions have the concept of different ages of their teachings. Christians, of course, have been waiting for the world to end any minute since about the year 33. Many schools of Buddhism have the concept of the early, vital era of the teaching (up til about 500 years after Gautama's death), the middle period (the next 500 years, in which the teaching starts to fade), and then Mappo, the age of degenerate teachings in which we live. Now I don't necessarily buy this in terms of Buddhist teachings, although if you read this blog you know that I know that our civilization is going to end in your lifetime, unless you get hit by a bus this weekend. But anyway: Hinduism is based on very long cyclical periods of history called yugas, which are bizarrely immense terms of years. We live in the Kali Yuga; Google it! This is the age of degeneracy and destruction.

So Kali Yuga yoga is yoga for the end of the world, in my interpretation. This works very well for me, since I disagree strongly with many Zen teachers, even some of my own, that things are getting better (sorry, Brad). Yoga, like Zen, is needed now so you can deal with the way things are going to be, in these real last days.

But if you don't believe any of that, that's OK. That won't change anything, anyway. But let me tell you this: this morning I woke up at about 2:30, sweating out toxins, and I had to try for a few minutes to remember what day of the week it was. There were many times in my life when that process was probably not a good thing, but this time it was because I was in such a deep sleep after last night's yoga, and deep sleep is not something I experience a lot recently. In a time in which our food in poison and every thing we touch is made from petroleum or corn, it's an amazing return to the true human condition to get in touch with your body, and hence all of reality, in this way.

To change your world, you must begin by changing yourself. To change yourself, you must accept yourself, and thereby realize that no change is necessary. Kali Yuga yoga, like Zen, is a good way to start.

By the way, Leah is appearing at the Buddhist Festival at as close to 12:40 p.m. as its fledgling stage manager (me) can make it happen. The schedule for the entire event is now posted here. You should come.

Chobits

I just finished watching disc 6 of a 7-disc anime series, Chobits. It's fairly well done being it's a few years old; one of the annoying things about watching anime if you're trying to go through their history backwards is that some of the older ones, even the classics like Ghost in the Shell, appear simplistic in their animation styles if not their plots; and certainly this series, like Masamune Shirow's classic stories, have spawned so much imitation, as well as had their ideas actually taken further in constructive ways, that they don't seem as original as they really were.

Chobits is a series that actually starts out slow to me, but by the time you get to discs 5 and 6 its originality and talent really show. This series was first brought up to me by a friend at the second Buddhist retreat I ever attended. She's a doctor, and she was intrigued by what the basic theme of the series - the nature and viability of personal and romantic relationships between humans and their personalized computerized creations. Chi, seen to the left, in one form, is a persacom; most of the PC's in this world, which also function as phones, search engines, and servants, seem to be in the form of attractive young women, which creates some interesting dynamics. Sure, these themes go back to Blade Runner and all sorts of classic sci-fi, but they become more relevant to us as our computers become a bigger part of our lives and the theme is not so far-fetched.

If you're interested in these themes, there's a lot of good anime and sci-fi for you, but I'm not going to try to summarize here. You should be aware of all of Shirow Masamune's work; he was a manga artist and writer whose visionary works deserve much more than I can give them in this article, but check out the anime versions of his Ghost in the Shell, Appleseed, and others.

The thought process that that discussion set forth in me, that still continues, is, what does this tell us about the nature of all of our relationships? Is it hard for you to believe you could fall in love with a machine? What if the machine was in no way perceptibly different from a human? If you don't think this is possible, the first thing that jumped out at me is how much this explains about our relationships with animals. While having a romantic relationship with a sheep is still frowned on in most circles, my point is this:

If you've been following this blog for a while, you've read a good bit about my cat, Ms. Johnson, who's 17 years old. At the moment, her odds of making it to 18 seem poor. If you'll remember, she had a stroke last year; she seems to have had another little one, or maybe a series of them, and last night I found her face down in the litter box again. She seems less out of it that last year; she maintains her appetite and thirst, and she still likes to be petted, but she just can't walk, although she can stumble and drag herself about. At some point, she is going to be unable to walk at all, and at that point, or at some other point, I'll probably have to make a decision about euthanizing her. Now I don't have any qualms about euthanasia if a person is able to make his own decision. A cat, like a person in a coma, can't. Now I don't have any of the qualms of the nutballs in the religious Right about the right to die. To me it is the one decision each of us should have the inviolable right to make. But even if Ms. Johnson could entertain that concept, how could she tell me? After all the loyalty she's shown to me for all these years, I don't want to kill her if she wants to live, or to keep her around if she's in pain.

But this isn't about that; although Ms. Johnson's very much on my mind tonight. The point is, I had a cheeseburger for dinner. Now I don't know if a cat is smarter than a cow or vice versa, although I'm sure there are studies that reach a conclusion about that, as if we were able to truly measure the intelligence of another species, or even of our own. But I know that a pig is smarter than either of them and I had a sausage biscuit for breakfast yesterday morning. I've discussed this issue, of our willingness to not only kill and eat animals, but to raise them under unnecessarily tortuous, horrid conditions, just for that purpose. In no way can Stephanie's love of her dog Gizmo and her fondness for pork chops be justified; it just exists.

And we really don't go that far. We'll preserve the life of an aging, ill man with no consciousness left, at terrible pain and expense; yet we're hire the young men of our country, with lies and delusion, to go murder innocent civilians in another country. We wouldn't think of being rude to our neighbor, yet we'll imprison people of another culture with no charge under mind-crusing conditions and torture at Guantanamo. Not of these polarities are justifiable; they just exist.

My conclusion is just that our attachments have nothing to do with their objects; they only appear to do so. In other words, your love for someone has nothing to do with any merit that person, animal or thing possesses or even appears to possess. Your attachments, like your desires are free-floating, determined by your needs. Ms. Johnson is no better than the pigs who are raised in disease-laden pens, yet I will cry when she dies, and I will, against my better judgment, occasionally eat one of those pigs.

I have long thought that all of our joys and fears, our good days and bad days, our suffering or satiation, are like this, free from external cause, more dependent on our brain chemistry than our experience. And further: what does this tell us about who we are? If this is true, can the identities we perceive as ourselves be said to exist in any objective sense?

I think not. But this blog entry is way too long already, so I'll leave you to feel it out for yourselves. I've been chewing on this for years and have yet to find the answer. But if the things we love are really just constructs in our heads:

What about the Rufi?

Spook Country

I let this one sneak on me. Ever since I discovered William Gibson in the mid-eighties, I've scooped up each of his books as soon as it hit the shelves; I knew this book, occuring in the world of Pattern Recognition (his last novel, which came out in 2002!) was coming out, but by the time it jumped out at me on Amazon.com, it I'd become so busy I hadn't even begun to think about reading a novel in weeks, months... but then I saw it, ordered it, counted the days til it came, and when it arrived last weekend, immediately devoured it. I spent last weekend in a fictional world created by the greatest living American writer, and I want to go back.

Gibson's main body of work today consists of two, what he calls "non-trilogies." The first, beginning with Neuromancer (1984), wherein he introduced the world to what he named "cyberspace" was set in the future, filled with technology unthought-of in the eighties. In fact, most of what he wrote has come to pass, and it's a tough call whether he foresaw the future or created it; the early pioneers of the modern internet all admit that it was his vision that inspired him to make cyberspace a reality. The second trilogy, beginning with Virtual Light (1993) was set in a much-nearer future, in which his pop icons and street people begin to realize those we see in our own lives. Pattern Recognition and Spook Country are set in today's world. When Gibson introduces technology we haven't heard of, we realize that not a bit of it is not doable with the tools we have right now, and we have to wonder if it's just that we haven't heard of it. It's not that Gibson has stopped creating his own world; it's just that we've finally come to live in the world he's been creating all along.

Gibson has transcended his genre in a way few writers have or ever will. In fact, I can't think of many science fiction writers whose work qualifies as great literature in every way, as Gibson's does. If you're truly a Gibson fan, find and rent the movie William Gibson: No Maps for these Territories, Mark Neale's documentary/interview with Gibson, in which Gibson admits that his characters in the first trilogy were a wooden, and that a lot of the phasing between the real world and cyberspace in the novels came from his inability as a fledgling writer to move his characters from place to place, physically. Those characters certainly don't have the depth of the ones in the second trilogy, yet they are immortal in the pantheons of science fiction; Molly the razorgirl was the model for the hard-edged heroines of modern sci-fi, and Case gave birth to most of its modern antiheroes.

Gibson, when asked by fans, in what order to read his fiction, basically says start with Burning Chrome) (1996), the compilation of earlier work which introduced cyberspace, the world of Neuromancer, and gave birth to "Johnny Mnemonic." But if you're just a fan of great writing, I'd say start with Pattern Recognition, then this book, then go back and enjoy the prior series as classics. Although technology is always a character in Gibson's work - he makes you want to go out and find new uses for your computer - the real characters here are real, beautifully drawn, and live in your fascination as do any great characters. Gibson's trilogies are non-trilogies are that they are the stories of different characters set in the same world, with some characters re-occuring to your delight; in this one, look for the reappearance of Humbertus Bigend and his Blue Ant company. But I think what brings me back to Gibson's latest fictional world, apparent even more upon re-reading when the plot is secondary, is the texture of his world, the way in which even the fictional becomes enlarged and textured in a new and fascination way; he reminds us that to truly appreciate the world we live in, we need to look at the details. I can't recreate the fabric of his fiction, but I can tell you that if you haven't, you need to go experience it for yourself. If you're already a Gibson fan, and haven't read this book, don' worry about being disappointed, go get it now. It's worth the wait.

A Slighty Different Weekend at the Atlanta Soto Zen Center

I stole this photo from the Atlanta Journal-Constitution; I'm using it because it's a good picture and because I was too lazy to take pictures of my own this weekend in Atlanta (despite having a pretty good camera on my new PDA), and the guy who was supposed to take pictures somehow didn't get it done. But it's going to mislead some people about Zen. It kind of looks like Michael Elliston, the newly (or newly-officially) transmitted Abbot of the Atlanta Soto Zen Center, is praying. Odds are he's either chanting, or just being posed by the photographer, who probably just thought it looked priestlike. You should read the AJC article that goes with the picture.

Of course everything about Zen that you hear or see is going to be somewhat misleading, other than the actual practice itself. So every time I find myself trying to talk about it, I kick myself. I can however tell you about my weekend.

Usually when I head off to Atlanta for a weekend zazenkai or sesshin, I'm in the mood. This time I wasn't particulary, partly because of the Buddhist burnout I've been getting from the Nashville Buddhist Festival, and because I've been experiencing a low level of non-specific tension which probably comes from a whole list of minor annoyances; but I was determined to go because Shohaku Okumura Roshi, founder of the Sanshin Zen Community of Bloomington, Indiana, was in town to conduct Sensei Elliston's transmission, as was Barbara Kohn, head priest of the Austin Zen Center. I've sort of met Sensei Kohn before; she was present the first time I visited the ASZC in April, 2006, but I've never had the opportunity to speak to her. I still haven't, but I do someday want to tell her I feel a link to her Austin Center because I started sitting at the San Francisco Zen Center in 1981, where she was later Abbot before going to Austin. And although the transmission ceremonies for Elliston, which occurred over six days, were secret, I wanted to see what was going on

Another difference was this time was that normally I stay in the ASZC from the time I arrive til I leave on Sunday; this trip, because of overcrowding at the center from the out-of-town teachers, their entourages, and senior ASZC disciples returning from afar to see the show (which, since the transmission ceremonies were secret, basically consisted of others there for the same reason), I was lucky enough to be put up by a couple who attend the ASZC and live in the nearby Virginia Highlands area of northeast Atlanta. Whereas normally when I attend a weekend session, I would be doing zazen/kinhin for about 7 1/2 - 8 hours a day, this time I figured out that I sat for 4 1/2 hours on Friday, 3 hours on Saturday, and 1 1/2 on Sunday, plus hearing one of Okumura Roshi's four lectures on the Shobogenzo (or a very small part thereof), and of course attending Sunday's ceremonies.

It was hot in the zendo, which along with the strange atmosphere created by the secretive scurrying about between the altars set up all over the Center for the secret transmission ceremonies, and by a few humorless senior disciples who don't share their Abbot's capacity for not losing his perception of absurdity (and that of my friends there), gave me an excuse to skip some cushion time and go exploring in the 100-degree Atlanta heat.

I need to go back to Virginia Highlands when I'm not going to the ASZC. There are some really interesting-looking bars and stores there; and no I didn't hit the bars, that would be an altogether different story. I did have some good noodles. And I did find the main building for the Center for Disease Control, a monster of a lab building which gave me thoughts about the Umbrella Corporation.

Anyway. In some ways I think I enjoyed the sitting I did and the ceremonies more because I wasn't exhausted from more sitting, and because I wasn't trapped in the center. By the time I got there, the sesshin had been going on for several days and I never really felt a part of it, and for the first time I behaved like a guest, coming and going and taking my meals outside. It gave me a whole new perspective, not necessarily a better one, but it's nice being able to move between perspectives, which is important for Zen, or at least for my Zen.

And I will say that it reaffimed my faith in Soto Zen, in the ASZC, in Taiun Micheal Elliston and in my own involvement with all of the above. By the end of Sunday, if I had it to do all over again, I would've come down Tuesday night for the entire sesshin, if work had permitted. And I am going to visit the Austin Zen Center someday, but I'm also going back to Atlanta on a different mission.

Morel Orel

And now for some entertainment! Those of you who know me know I'm not much on what passes for comedy in our culture, or in our lack thereof. Half the people I know sit around all night stuffing their faces with chocolate and watching buffoons do pratfalls and tell jokes that aren't funny. On the other hand, occasionally I see comic gems like The Life Aquatic with Steve Zissou, which I stumbled across a couple of weeks ago - a Bill Murray movie the promo of which did it no justice. The Life Aquatic is by the same director who did Rushmore and The Royal Tennenbaums, so rush out and get it now.

And then there's Morel Orel. If you're old enough to have seen Davey and Goliath as a kid, well, this is the anti-Davey. South Park was good but it got old; this is new and it's the funniest damn thing I've seen in a long time.

I now know Christianity is not to blame for human ignorance; it's just another symptom. I now know that in our headlong rush toward Armageddon (see, these Christian terms are useful!), it won't make any difference one way or another. We all know that ignorance rises endlessly; occasionally if feels good to see someone shoot it down with buckshot.

So if you hated church as much as I did when I was a kid, if you saw it was all bullshit and lies the first time you heard their pious mumbling out the sides of their mouths, this show is for you. I just finished the first disc of ten episodes. The above clip is the intro to one of the show episodes; the clip below is something someone did and posted on YouTube with Orel discovering drugs, with an added metal soundtrack.

Some days it just feels good to be alive.

Aggressive Humility?

Note: October 13, 2007. This is certainly the most controversial blog entry I've ever written, here on a local level, and I keep putting it up and taking it back down, because there are some people who probably should be offended by it, whom I don't want to offend. On the other hand, it has some big fans. So I've put it back up, with a couple of disclaimers and partial apologies. So if you think you're targeted in here, sorry; there was a lot of stress at that point, and it's an accurate reflection of where my mind was, when I wrote it.

Once again I find myself in the position of apologizing for a long period of no blogging -- over a month this time. I do have lots of excuses; I've been working on the Nashville Buddhist Festival website and on the Festival itself, as well as preparing to go to Atlanta in August for the last two and a half days of a five-day sesshin. I've been helping Deuce on his blog, and trying to figure out if my job is getting so disorganized that I won't be able to make the money I need. But mostly, sometimes I get burned out on all this activity and I need to sink into myself for a while; I spent almost three weeks without working out or doing any organized Zen activity, hardly watched any movies -- spent a lot of time on the couch. Sometimes it's just necessary, in terms of brain chemistry and getting myself back together to do all the things I normally do.

So now I'm back, working out, working on the Buddhist stuff again now that I don't resent it, and I realized I hadn't written a blog entry since the third week of June. If you've ever done much writing, you'll realize that getting back to it after you've stopped is the most difficult time, and the only way to break it is to force yourself to write it. Trouble is, in this case I don't want to force you (or You, as my egoless comrades might say, see below) to read it if I've got nothing to say. So I had to wait until something occurred to me at the right time. Here it is.

It struck me yesterday when I received an email from the Theravadan representative on the Buddhist Festival that they have finally booked their speaker for the Festival, a Theravadan monk. I was waiting because I wanted to post a speaker page on the Festival site, along with the speaker pages for my teacher Michael Elliston, the Shambhala speaker, and Lisa Ernst who's speaking on behalf of her own locally organized group. Now, the Theravadan rep for the Festival is a great guy and he's been one of the mainstays of the Festival since its inception four years ago, and it just took them a while to book their speaker. But when I get the speaker page it's about three sentences with no picture; picture to follow, with not enough text to fill the page.

The explanation for the lack of picture is that the monk is a very ego-less guy, and it will take a while to convince him to let his picture be used. So, the monk's lack of egolessness, asserted by not allowing his picture to be used, means that the web page is held up, the entries for the various groups in the Festival can't be parallel, and the Buddhist community is deprived of the information on this speaker that they have on all the others. It strikes me that the other speakers, who may or may not have wanted to supply complete bio's, did so out of service to the community and the Festival and not for their personal aggrandizement, whereas the monk could inconvenience everyone else by asserting his egolessness. So who is truly humble, and who is passive-aggressively asserting, "Hey, I'm Humble!"?

Then there's this other guy on the Festival who represents a different supposedly Zen group, who's been full of great ideas all through the organizational period but hasn't supplied word one on himself for the web page. So we have a big lotus flower as a placeholder for him on the Board page and no speaker page at all, although as it turns out, he'll probably speaking as a Board member on the forums, plus as the speaker for his group (as he's ordained, you see) -- plus he may be the MC for the Festival. His big contribution so far has been to get the Board to pay for a design for a logo (which isn't much and is much inferior to the nice piece of art it's based on). He's also cast the schedule in his own image. The person in question got all his stuff in and did an admirable job at the Festival. I think his group probably got more growth out of this year's NBF than any other, and I'm actually happy for them. I hope to go sit with them sometime. And as to the logo: I've since met the designer and she is one of the sweetest people I've met in a long time. I am still a little critical of the design, but what do I know about visual art? when there are artists around... I picked this particular version of Lisa's lotus originally for its long stem, which is cut off on the logo, and I don't really like the font. On the other hand, I think the designer was probably working with specific instructions. I'll have to ask her sometime, if I ever get the nerve to broach the subject.

Now the Board, being nice Buddhists, have gone along with all this stuff. You know me, and I'm not a nice Buddhist, but I was being the new guy and just sitting there. So now that all the fruits of all this are coming home, I'm just frustrated and getting cranky. And those of you who know me know you don't want to see me cranky. So anyway, this guy I'm talking about has a way of writing; he refuses to capitalize the pronoun "I" and instead capitalizes the "Y" in "you", so you get sentences like "i only live to serve You." For those of use who like the English language..... Anyway, so I leave you to speculate, when is up-front egolessness just another way of asserting ego? Is "Hey, I'm Humble!" truly an expression of humility? You decide. And then look around you and see where else you can spot this behavior. I advise you to look to preachers and used-car salesmen.

By the way, I'm probably being unfair to the monk. He probably doesn't speak much English or know what the hell is going on. But I did get this bile spit out, so maybe I can write something next time. And someone from the Zen group or the Buddhist Festival is probably gonna crap all over me for this blog entry. Because it promotes disharmony, I guess. But sometimes my taste in music runs that way, too. And I tired of people being tolerated because they're rich and successful. Some of us chose not to go that way. But I don't want to assert any humility.

P.S. We're going to have a very good Nashville Buddhist Festival. We have great yoga, good music, and some really good speakers. There also should be amusing moments. You should all come, Sept. 15; location on the website.

The Razor's Edge

Often I'm afraid to return to a book or to a movie that I enjoyed when I was younger. Often, I have changed, and the work I idolized is seen to be either adolescent or full of holes. Thus with trepidation I added The Razor's Edge to my Netflix and set in to view it this past Sunday morning. Verdict? This movie is just as great as I thought it was in the mid-80's and it is still probably my favorite of all time.

The Razor's Edge is the second movie adaptation of Somerset Maugham's novel of the same name, and is true to the book, as far as I can remember. Bill Murray portrays Larry Darrell, an American aristocrat of my grandparents' generation who is headed for a career as a well-connected stockbroker in Chicago; he is engaged to money and headed for the American dream of the 1920's. His life is forever changed when he sees the horrors of war in person as a volunteer ambulance driver both before and after America's late entry into WWI. Unable to return to his pipe dream of a former life, he heads out on a spiritual quest that takes him through the coal mines of France to India (actually, as filmed, it appears he goes to Lhasa). He finds his enlightenment in the mountains and attempts to return to his life, where he discovers that it is easy to be a holy man on a mountain, but....

This movie was made at the peak of Bill Murray's early fame, and the legend is that he agreed to make Ghostbusters just so the studio would put out this movie for him. It was the first indication of his dramatic talent; I'm sure I was not the only one surprised, and Larry Darrell is kind of a precursor to the characters he plays in his later works, such as Lost in Translation and Broken Flowers; the darkly illuminated sage with more than a wry twist. Bill Murray is a genius, and his selection and execution of this role are probably that genius' best expression. You have to excuse Garfield; we all like money.

You really have to see this movie for yourself; I can't tell you how great the acting is, or the direction, or the subtlety of the premise and its underlying message. I can't imagine the public at large would understand the movie, which sounds elitist and is thus probably true. Just make sure you don't wind up with the 1946 version of the movie with Tyrone Power, which is garbage except for a brilliant performance by Gene Tierney. In the early version, the scenes which appear to have been filmed in the Himalayas in the later version, appear to be soundstage reproductions of a child's view of Heaven, complete with paper angels. Gene was good, though.

This movie came out in 1984, but I am not quite sure when I first saw it; it seems I rented the VHS tape (I don't remember it in the theatres), so I don't know if it was before or after I started my short-lived but important "spiritual" recovery in 1986, which included my SGI (NSA) period and my introduction to my physical workouts. Buddhism and step aerobics have saved me from perdition more than once, so although this period ended in relative disaster in the early 90's, it was crucial to my becoming whoever it is I am now. Anyway I don't remember exactly who I was when I first saw this movie, but I have seen it many times over the years. I think I took Larry Darrell as a role model, and considering some of the other role models I had in my youth, this one was fortunate.

Darrell goes on a spiritual quest that would have been probable only in the first half of the twentieth century, when world travel had become an option, but we had not yet been inundated with Eastern spirituality. He hears of the Upanishads for the first time from a drunken coal miner, after spending a year or two in Paris reading Western philosophy. He then goes to India, supposedly, although the place he goes to wash dishes and experience enlightenment is clearly a Tibetan Buddhist monastery, but I'll let that pass (remember this was before 1950). His very physical journey can only be a metaphor for most of us, though some tried to emulate it in the 1960's. It may or may not be fortunate that we can now study Eastern thought from the comfort of our living rooms, as it makes it harder to sift through the crap (of which the East has its share, trust me).

There are pivotal scenes in this movie that will remain with me for all time, and for which I could've supplied the dialogue, even before seeing the movie last Sunday for the first time in, surely, ten years. Then there is the enlightenment scene itself, where Darrell, sent to mediate alone in a hut in a blizzard, smiles, uses his books for tinder, and decides he's been on the mountain long enough. That scene has no dialogue, and is a masterpiece of understatement that will not be found in a movie popular with today's dumbed-down masses. It's followed by his dialogue with the head monk (paraphrased):

Darrell: It's easy to be a holy man on top of a mountain.

Monk: The road to salvation is narrow, and as difficult to walk as the razor's edge.

The latter line is a quote from the Upanishads, I believe, and is featured on the flyleaf of the Maugham novel.

If the movie ended at this point or before, , it would have comported with whatever dim view most modern Americans have of enlightenment. It is however Darrell's choice to return to his life, and then how he lives it, which make this movie a true lesson on "spirituality." It certainly changed my vision of the same.

I think I took Darrell's path as a metaphor or model for my own, and I am glad I did. Most of it is metaphor; I've never been in a war, so I made my own wars. I didn't have to go to Tibet; I found people in America, in print and in person, who were able to point some things out to me, to wake me up. Now I don't really believe in sudden enlightenment, so I have to take Darrell's realization in the hut as an encapsulation of an ongoing process; but I have realized that the real tests of whatever understandings one comes to, come in real life, not in retreat from the world or in meditation.

The Razor's Edge is not the kind of movie I normally watch these days. Most drama which is supposedly based in reality appears to me to be a propaganda of our cultures' collective unconscious, an almost Reaganistic mass self-hypnosis, so I find fantasy to be more psychologically true. Of course, not many movies on the level of The Razor's Edge ever get made.

In confirmation of my current understanding that "enlightenment" is not an instantaneous permanent transformation, but an ongoing process of growth, Darrell comes to his deepest realization only at the end (of the movie), when the person he loves and tries to save is taken from him. He realize that in the end, there is no reward, there is no payoff, from our actions, separate from our actions themselves. This is an important message to those of you who are still suffering in hope of Heaven; Heaven is now.

John Lennon, for all his occasion wrongheadedness, said some remarkable things, some of them probably unconsciously. It might behoove us all to remember that all karma is Instant Karma.

Not Going to Bonnaroo? Here's Something Better

If you had told me when I was growing up in Manchester, Tennessee, in the sixties and seventies, that in the first decade of the twenty-first century my hometown would be the location of the largest ongoing rock festival in the world, I would have told you that you were doing, well, some of the same drugs I was doing, with different results. But it's true. Manchester has maybe 12,000 people, but once a year the population goes up by 90,000 or so when Bonnaroo comes. As to why they come, I can't really tell you; there was one really stellar year, I think it was probably about 2004, when almost everyone I would have wanted to see in the pop music world played there, from Bob Dylan to Ani Difranco to Liz Phair, and I don't remember who else. Unfortunately, most of the acts were announced late, and I wasn't in a good phase and couldn't go, despite the fact that you could hear the damn thing from my mother's carport.

Anyway, since then, the line-up has sucked so bad I can't believe it sells out. The headliners this year are the Police, a band that should have stayed broken up (if we could only get U2 to join them in oblivion...). There are a few good acts, but my days of spending four days in what promises to be mind-numbing heat in a former cow pasture are over. I did once live for three days at a bluegrass festival in North Carolina on acid and whiskey and almost got beaten senseless by Hell's Angels, but I digress. I no longer emulate Hunter Thompson as much as I admire his work. My advice: if you absolutely must go to Manchester, TN, this coming weekend, avoid Bonnaroo like the plague; I'm avoiding the whole town, even at the cost of not seeing my dad on Father's Day. Instead, the guy who just sold the land to Bonnaroo owns some real farms in the area, and if you drive around the right pastures you can see bison! Yep, real, authentic beefalo! This is the other thing I never wouldn've believed I'd see in Manchester -- rejects from a bad Kevin Costner movie (or is that redundant) are everywhere! A vision of the past without drugs! Whatever.

I also suggest that while you're avoiding Bonnaroo, you hop on your I-Tunes (or if you must, order a CD on the internet, or maybe while you're hunting bison you can still find a record store) and download Bif Naked's latest album, Superbeautifulmonster. You've seen me mention Ms. Naked throughout the months in these blogs, and I did feature that beautiful video someone made from computer game graphics with her version of Metalica's "Nothing Else Matters"; in fact "Nothing Else Matters" is on Superbeautifulmonster, which came out in 2005 (I am nothing if not timely). I just got around to purchasing her laterst because I listened to all of her previous stuff so much for so long I kind of burned myself out, but I was ready, and this album is worth it. If you like heavy but catchy pop-rock this is for you. Her music always gets stuck in my head and on my car system.

Bif's story is kind of interesting, too. I'll let you read it on her website, but basically, she was just another rootless rock waif, raised in India by Canadian missionaries, who came back to British Columbia to die of punk rock and alcohol. Then something changed; inspired by Gail Greenwood, one of my favorites who played with Belly and L7 among others, she went Straight Edge (until the fascistic edges of that movement got on her nerves), but stayed vegetarian, and has adopted a lot of the Hinduistic culture of the country where she was raised into her consciousness. In short, she became quite a fascinating human being, and she makes great music. I've seen her live a couple of times, and if you get the opportunity, don't miss her; she doesn't tour outside Canada often, and certainly not in the American South. She gives a great live rock and roll performance (think, latter-day Joan Jett, whose appearance at the Tennessee State Fair a few years ago reminded me that you can still be cool over 40, which thought I was desperately in need of), and she's absolutely beautiful, if tiny. Really neat tattoos, too. I just really find her inspiring, somehow.

Of course, like all the best music from the 90's, especially all those great female-fronted acts, Bif's career seems to be languishing now. But go out and get I, Bificus, and see why she almost broke big. And then you can wish she would show up at Bonnaroo, instead of the crap that's playing there. Apologies to Hot Tuna and Junior Brown, who are great, of course.


Here's an old video off Bif's Purge album. Enjoy! It's music time, again.

Namaste

Namaste is a sort of Hindu/Yogi term that people say to each other at the end of Yoga classes. It means something like "the spirit in me speaks to the spirit in you," and it's pronounced "Na-MAH-stay" ( so you don't run around saying "NAM-aced" to each other). It's kind of like what Zen people mean when they say Gassho, but not quite. It's what I feel compelled to say to you this morning after perhaps the most amazing, vivid, meaningful, and heartwarming dream I've ever had, in the last few hours.

I also wanted to offer this as sort of a coda to Jim's pieces I published earlier this week. He tells me people say to him all the time, how can you get out of bed in the morning if you're really this pessimistic. He says he just tries to laugh. But I think he's right, and I think it's important and meaningful to realize that through circumstances of birth, you're living at the end of Western civililzation as we know it, if not the world. It's helpful because knowing where and when you are now helps you know how to live in it, your present life.

But there is no reason to stop working toward making the world better, nor a reason for despair. Why? I can't really tell you, but you can find out for yourself.

I won't give you the dreams I've just had; trying to really explain a dream takes up a huge amount of time and space for even a short dream, because the language of dreams is not the language of the spoken or written word, and cannot be reduced to it. It was one of those rare occasions when I come up from a dream in such a way that I only gradually realize it's not reality, and am saddened by it. Among other things, it gave me a chance to talk and hang out with my mother, whose birthday is a week from tomorrow and who died a little over four years ago. It was large and complex and involved a lot of people I've known throughout my life. I know you must've had those and with luck remembered them.

The most significant immediate impact of this dream was that in its process I understood the meaning of the Buddhist meaning of Rebirth as opposed to the Hindu idea of Reincarnation, for the first time. I'd always thought this term was a lame gibberish response to the Reincarnation concept, which was pretty universal in the time of the Buddha. I won't belabor it here, because words by even the most enlightened and intellectual teachers had never made any sense to me or led to any understanding; I could resproduce or respond to them with my own rational mind, but intuitively they felt like bullshit. Briefly, Reincarnation means the recurrence of a soul through time in different incarnations. Since one of the basic premises of Buddhism is that there is no soul, there is nothing to be reborn. Yet clearly in early Buddhist teachings, human existence did not end after one lifetime. You see the problem.

And I can't give you the answer, because it's not verbally possible. I can hint that it has a bit to do with the nature of time, but even that's misleading; the rest is in the dream language, which can't be spoken. See?

I'm not saying I had an enlightenment experience here, any more than we all have little ones every day. But my own understanding was deepened. And I can tell you that even the Christians are not entirely wrong, nor the Hindus.

It would be easier to tell you what I understood about the nature of dreams: They are how the different awarenesses that make up "you" talk to each other, learn from each other and unify. And I don't mean any huge cosmological thing here, although that could be involved too, if you look at it that way. I just mean the little awarenesses. Did you ever realize that you know something that you couldn't have known? Or how your car seems to drive itself home sometimes? Little awarenesses, like how you have a rock in your shoe as you sprint the last five yards. Or that perfect visual image you suddenly have of a house you haven't seen since childhood. You have more than one "mind" and the more they come together the more you "grow."

Against my better judgment, to make your life better and to make mine better when I interact with you, I would advise this: Pursue your zazen, or your yoga, or your religion if your religion is really deeper understanding and not just abuse of mind, body and soul (and how would you know?). And make sure you sleep enough so you can dream. And be kind to the people and the animals and even the things around you, because rest assured, you'll see them again. Even if you're not you and they're not them. Compassion isn't bullshit and it isn't being "nice," it's just the only real way to deal with your life.

But don't trust me in this. Rest assured, you're learning in your own way. I just had to try in vain to express it. And try to relax, because even when it's all really fucked, it's OK. Namaste.

Another Guest Post, by Jim

Jim got so much response to my last post of his, he wanted me to do this one. So here it is...

Another look at the almighty dollar

By JIM LYDECKER
Wednesday, May 23, 2007

It seems like only yesterday the Federal debt reached $8 trillion (Oct. 18, 2005). For those of you counting, we are about to pass another dubious milestone and reach the unheard amount of $9 trillion. Adding another trillion in record time prompted the Economist to dryly remark, "At least it hasn't hit a zillion yet.

"The impending crisis caused by the exploding federal deficit and debt is something that raises its ugly head in the press from time to time. Ever so often, some politician, economist, congressional committee or think tank reminds us that we are looking at a financial meltdown of unprecedented proportions.

But when it comes to money, there is something worse to worry about: The collapse of the fiscal system brought on by currency that can become worthless overnight.

A financial collapse brought on by debt is like an organism infected by a cancer it couldn't control. 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 gold and powerful armies -- lived beyond their means, they had to strive for empires of easy fortunes.

Those nations 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 with 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 its value set at 1/35 of an ounce of gold. 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. On Aug. 15, Nixon essentially declared insolvency until we could come up with something new.

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.

The problem is that this arrangement can't last.

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.Concern for pricing oil only in dollars helps explain our willingness to drop everything and teach Saddam a lesson for his defiance in demanding euros for oil after 9/11.

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 Tehran 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.

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 awaiting us, and it is not promising.