Bereft Object No. 1

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"Death comes, death comes."





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Another weekend of hard prep work getting things ready for a whole slew of family to move in. More painting, more furniture rearranging. New light fixtures, etc.

Also, the much beloved O'Keefe & Merritt stove started falling apart on us, the door springs busted, the broiler refusing to light or stay lit. So on saturday I took her all apart and tilted her back so I could get underneath her, propped a footstool and a pile of books under so she couldn't crush my head, and spent the next three hours trying to fix the busted door springs. It's one of those deals kind of like fishing wires through the walls trying to wire a new outlet, you've got a flimsy hook you're trying to thread up into the hidden void between the oven and the broiler, and the hook has to grab onto a tiny knob on the back of the door hinge, then a steel cable hooks to that and runs through a pulley and down to a big spring that hooks into a hole on the bottom of the stove. There's one of these setups for each hinge on the oven door and the grillevator door. I managed to get both of the hinges on the oven door repaired and restrung, but the grillevator door is running on just the one hinge. I disassembled the broiler shut-off safety valve that was malfunctioning and not letting any gas run to the burner head. I reassembled that and tightened everything up and now she's running like a champ. While I had her stripped down I gave her a good overall bath in hot water and simple green, washed her and scrubbed off all the accumulated grease and grime, cleaned the oven racks and the inside of the oven and the broiler, the burner heads and drip pans, the back and sides, everywhere I could get to. Then I rubbed her all down with an old dog towel till she shined and glowed pure white like some holy thing.

Which she is.

Ready for Thanksgiving!




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All that work was done as a kind of half-assed penance for some bad behavior on my part. Also I managed to put a pretty good strain or tear on the flexor tendon of my left index finger. It swole up pretty good and I can't really do much with it now. It wouldn't bother me so much if it wasn't my damn trigger finger.


Just when I think I'm just about the best thing since sliced bread I manage to put that notion out of contention in a pretty convincing way.

You could set your watch by it.


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It is one thing to beat yourself up over imagined shortcomings, another one entirely to stand gape-mouthed at your own stupidity and bad acts.



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That woman was pretty good about it, too. I am damn grateful to her for that.



She's a wonder, that one.



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I feel like a great storm has gathered and is soon to set upon us. Nor will aught be left standing. Nor will aught be spared or left unchanged.


Me, I'm itching to throw open the shutters, strip buck naked, and stand howling in the teeth of it.


I don't believe that act will protect me nor any of those I am bound to try to save.


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I think Hume is right about us being primarily emotionally driven, with the rational mind mostly just running around behind us, trying to tidy up. I don't know if it's a good idea to always be yearning to be better than you are, but I can't seem to accept that I'm good enough the way I am. I know myself too well for that. I think that probably, yes, I am not separate from the great universal groundless consciousness, not any more than anyone else. But also, I am running an operating system that is very primitive and error prone, so it might actually be a good idea to kind of fault-check my base suppositions from time to time, and, you know, defrag my hard drive and dump my cache of cookies.

Plus give myself a good degreasing and maybe rub myself all over with a fluffy towel.


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I am grateful to be alive, and healthy, and loved. Employed and paid up. Sheltered and transported.


And given each day the wonderful puzzle of the entire universe to ponder and hang out in.


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What did I ever do to deserve all these riches?






Not a damn thing.





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Namaste.




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Wonderland

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Is the self a cage from which one should struggle to be free?



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Or should we see it as a home?



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Is it both things?




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Maybe I should treat it both ways while I try to work through the conundrum. I can patch and paint the worn walls, knock down the cobwebs, scrub the floors, fix the toilet, open the windows to let in some light.

At the same time, dig at a spot on the floor with the spoon I hide from the guards under my mattress, take a handful of dirt out each day, working on my escape.



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We watched "Inside Job" last night. A documentary designed to make you pissed off, if you weren't already.

I couldn't help seeing the behavior of the wall street investment banks and giant insurance companies, the traders, the politicians, the regulators, the insiders and money-makers, as inevitable. Environments are made to be exploited. That is to say, that the very function of life, of living organisms, is to exploit the resources of the environment as efficiently as possible. And that's all that happened.

It's just that those guys are parasites that live off our labor and our efforts and they are sucking us dry and they will keep at it until all of us are stone cold dead.

It's nothing to get mad about. It's in their nature.


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Something we should probably take notice of, however.



If we want to survive.



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I am not a big-picture thinker. Or maybe it is more accurate to say that I am not a big-picture actor. I don't really believe in protest, in sign-waving and chanting and all that. It irritates the fuck out of me, point of fact. I can't tell you how fast I reach for the knob when I hear some fucking yahoo shouting, "What do we want?" and then a bunch of outraged people shouting "PEACE!"


*click.*


I got no patience for it.


I have a more contractive, isolative, individual reaction. I grow the hedge around my house higher and thicker. I dig the moat deeper.

Put more heads on pikes around the perimeter.


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And inside the walls, I tend my private paradise.


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I guess it's the same with my self, my ego. Barbed wire and trenches filled with gasoline on the outside, a gorgeous walled garden with burbling springs, redolent with the scent of roses and lilacs, abuzz with the sound of bees and birdsong.


All built on a giant raft that's headed for the falls, the mist rising and the roar getting louder by the day.



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Namaste.



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Self at Forty Seven

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I think my face is a pretty accurate mirror of my soul. Like Orwell said, at fifty every man has the face he deserves. Not quite there yet, but it's true enough already.


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Pretty awesome birthday week. Had range training on wednesday, got up before dawn yesterday and today to serve warrants on some shitholes out in BFE. Yay, shooting! Yay, pointing guns! Yay, predawn raids!


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I know, I know.



I should be over that shit already.



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I can't help myself, though.




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I'm not one of those people who dread growing older. I embrace it. I wouldn't go back if you paid me. The aches and pains and slowing down, the deafness and the ringing in my ears, the sleepless nights, the failing eyes, they're all worth it.

We earn that shit, man.



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I got nothing profound to say today. I'm going to get in some meditation and some restorative yoga goodness, and eat dinner with my beautiful and amazing wife, and then lay on the sofa and watch some streaming netflix goodness.

Maybe she'll let me watch one of those PBS Nova shows, or some shit about neanderthals.


Or something about killing.



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Namaste.




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And She Was

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Did you read about the discovery of abalone shells with ocher pigments and bone marrow mixtures in a cave in South Africa? This hundred thousand year old art studio pushes back the earliest evidence of human symbolic thinking forty thousand years. Lascaux paintings are less than twenty thousand years old. The Chauvet cave paintings just over thirty thousand years old. There is evidence of Neanderthal jewelry and painting that is over fifty thousand years old.

The Great Leap Forward as put forward by Jared Diamond proposes that humanity as a species suddenly developed the capacity for symbolic thought and language after migrating out of Africa and settling in Eastern Europe, due to some combination of sociological pressures due to increased population density and a sudden evolutionary change in the human brain, which led to the development of more sophisticated tools, speech, and manipulation of the environment (leading from pastoral nomadism towards a nascent agricultural society).

In this view, the ascent of man follows a natural linear progression in which we, as modern humans, and the only remaining homo genus, are at the pinnacle of evolutionary growth.

But we know that evolution has no destination (well, I believe that consciousness, universal self-recognition, awareness of everything by everything else, may be, in fact, where everything could be headed, but I certainly don't have any data to back up that supposition...). Thinking that evolution has a point is a continuation of the ancient human tendency to see ourselves as being at the center of everything, at the top of everything, where the all the men are strong, all the women good-looking, and all the children are above average....

If the evidence that humans were mixing paints in order to express symbolic thoughts a hundred thousand years ago shows that our "modern" brains are much older than we previously believed, it raises an interesting possibility about what we have become in the last ten thousand years. Now, we have to keep in mind that we have incredibly few data points to refer to, and there may have been vast cities and whole civilizations that we're blind to, because nothing was left of them, or we haven't looked yet in the right places, or we don't recognize the remnants, etc. We have scant data, so it's easy to draw conclusions that are completely unsupported and just plain wrong. But still, an interesting thought nags at me when I ponder this new information.

If modern human society did in fact arise relatively quickly after some genetic mutation that spawned our modern human brains, then it makes some sort of sense that our current society reflects in some way the structure of our brains, that it is in some sense inevitable that we develop agriculture, cities, trade, science, and fill up the available space, use up the available resources, and choke on our own pollution and starve to death in a horrifyingly overpopulated, decimated petri dish of a planet, victims of our own evolutionary "success" in out competing every other species on earth.

Definitely a potential outcome, given our current course.

But what if we've been hanging around for a hundred thousand years with most of our modern thinking tools intact? What if it's been longer, say a hundred and fifty thousand? Two hundred thousand? Then a somewhat different picture emerges, one in which we can conceive of an almost timeless edenic realm where mankind lived in balance with his environment. Not in peace and harmony, I mean, lifetimes were short and death came early and violently for the vast majority of us. We killed each other. We killed other creatures to eat, and we were killed and eaten ourselves. So, it wasn't some hand-holding, stand around the fire and sing with the lions and the lambs of the circle of life, but it wasn't what we have now, either. We didn't outstrip our resources on a planetary scale. I think it's likely that we did on a local scale, but with the transient nature of pastoral nomadism we likely left a denuded area for a long enough time for it to replenish itself before our group or another one reoccupied it.

If you contemplate a society of small tribal groups of humans wandering around hunting and gathering and raiding outlying groups and singing and painting and falling in love and making babies and getting eaten by lions and falling off cliffs and getting crushed by giant sloths or mastadons in a endlessly repeating cycle of lifetime after lifetime, hundreds of years, thousands, tens of thousands, fifteen or twenty times longer than our own idea of our civilization, where each generation's experience of life is exactly the same as the previous one's, and the one which follows, you get this idea of a kind of a timeless experience of existence, an existence where time only expressed itself in a cyclical way, through the seasons and the movement of the stars, birth and death and rebirth, forever- there was no, there could have been no conception of time's arrow, of movement through time. Time did not start over here and then end up over there. Time was like the sea, like the sky, always new and ancient at the same moment. It didn't go anywhere.

Think about what that kind of existence, that kind of conception of time and your place in it might do to your world-view.




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It changes everything.



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It makes me wonder if our sudden explosion of growth and scientific quest for knowledge and our drive to dominate and exploit the world and the whole of the universe is merely a side-effect of a shift in our conception of time, of what it is and how it works. If we somehow stopped seeing life as something to be lived, our whole existence no longer just a single, uninterrupted present moment, but now suddenly only a way-station on a journey from where we were to where we are going. Time is moving, it has a destination. And we are moving through time, with time, it's running out. We can't stay here forever. We are going, and if we don't we'll be left behind, so let's be first.


Let's get them before they get us. Let's kill more of them. Let's plant more food. Let's build bigger walls, and stouter spears, and let's make engines and let's go let's go let's go!


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Maybe all of this is just a symptom of a new and sudden species-wide mental illness. Or a philosophical error. A malignancy of sorts.



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Interesting to think about, for me anyway.



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At any rate, I think that vast and nearly limitless history of small-group pastoral nomadism explains a lot to me about my experience of being human. Why I feel comfortable in a small group of people and jumpy and anxious in a crowd. Why I love walking in the woods or along the beach alone or with my wife and my dog and I could do it for hours and hours and hours every day. Why I love to gaze at the stars and cook meat over a fire. Why I love to fight. Why it feels good in my bones to protect my tribe and to make war against those who would harm them. Why it feels better to be outside than inside. Why paperwork and minutia and clock-watching and meetings are soul killing. Why cities baffle and assault. Why moving water sounds like music and why the thrash of the surf on the shore lights my heart on fire and soothes it at the same time.

We are ancient things lost in a modern world.


Our biology has not caught up with our environment, and I don't think it ever will. This environment isn't stable enough, it won't last long enough for our slow churning evolutionary mechanisms to react to it.


Can't go back, though.



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Maybe the key is to try to recapture a more functional conception of time. Maybe we could do that. That seems possible.



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In other news, last night I made hot and sour grilled fish salad and Pad Kee Mao for the woman and me.


Ruck me funning, it were good.

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Hot and Sour Grilled Fish Salad


Grill, bake, or fry a couple of fillets of a good white-fleshed fish. Let them cool and break them up into bite-sized pieces and put them in a bowl. Add two stalks of finely sliced lemongrass, a couple of shallots, a cup of sliced mint leaves, a handful of sliced bird chilies or jalapenos, a few sliced kaffir lime leaves, an inch chunk of ginger, minced, six tablespoons of lime juice and one limes worth of zest, a generous tablespoon of fish sauce, a teaspoon of honey, salt and pepper to taste. Mix that shit together, let it sit in the fridge while you cook your Pad Kee Mao, then when it's time to eat, lay out some lettuce leaves on a plate and mound the fish salad on the leaves, serve with lime wedges and sliced spring onions.

And an ice-cold beer.


SCOTT'S PAD KEE MAO

1 lb. shrimp, peeled, deveined, split down the back so they'll butterfly when they hit the wok.

12 garlic cloves, chopped

1/4 cup chopped fresh thai chilies or jalapenos.

tablespoon of whole peppercorns

1/2 cup mushrooms, sliced thin.

small napa cabbage, sliced thin.

can of bamboo shoots, rinsed and drained and chopped in half.

tablespoon of sambal olek

red onion, sliced thin

1/4 cup fish sauce

1/4 cup black soy sauce

1/4 cup golden mountain sauce

1 tablespoon honey

1 red bell pepper, cut into strips

1/2 cup fresh thai leaves (or regular fresh basil)

two large eggs, beaten.

Big mess of wide rice noodles, 16, 18, 20 oz., whatever you have. Boil for five minutes, drain, rinse well in cold water, set aside.  Heat oil in a wok over medium-high heat. Add garlic, pepper and Thai chiles; saute 30 seconds. Add shrimp and all the wet ingredients and saute about 2 minutes. I ran out of room in the wok, so I started the mushrooms and cabbage in a cast-iron skillet and then added the beaten eggs and when they were done I threw that mess back into the wok. Stir fry a little longer, add noodles; toss to coat.

This will feed us all weekend, or six normal people one time.

Sambal Olek, cilantro, chopped peanuts, mint leaves, limes wedges, sweet chili sauce, sliced spring onions to go with.

And more beer.

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Woot.

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Namaste.

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Manning The Oars

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Last night I dreamed that there were two Batmans. The good one and his evil twin. But the evil batman was the Bruce Wayne guy, the rich and successful one, the one who helped society and gave money to the orphans and lived in a high rise penthouse overlooking Gotham. When the evil Batman got in his costume, he was huge and powerful and malevolent, mocking and derisive and as cruel as nature.

The good batman was a criminal for his day job, and he used all that inside information to try to strike a blow for justice when he was in his Batman costume. But his Batman costume was weak-sauce compared to the evil Batman's. He didn't have a jet pack or a rocket car or anything like that. He took the bus. Nobody really gave him a second look, his Batman persona was just a joke. People saw him and thought, "Crazy guy on the bus, don't sit next to him, just hang on to the strap or go sit next to that fat guy who smells bad."

Plus, the good Batman would always give the bad guys a break. He'd rescue the innocent when he could, and make things right, but when it came time to whomp up on the bad guy, the good Batman would just shake his head and sigh. Maybe he'd lock a guy up to a lamppost or something, you know, throw his car keys into the river, but that was about it.

He wouldn't even lecture the guy.


Then in the morning he'd go back to his life of petty crime, which he was also kind of terrible at.


Bruce Wayne thought all of this was just about the funniest thing ever. He laughed all the time, it cracked him up.



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It's a quiet morning so far. The deck is wet from a heavy, spitting kind of morning drizzle, not quite rain, not quite fog alone. I've got some dark, hot, bitter coffee in me and I can hear the woman starting up in the other room, getting ready to paint I think.


I better go give her a hand.



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I had this weather running through me all weak( hmm....freudian slip much?), anxious and worried, like there was something big I'd neglected to do.


Then, just like that, it blew out of town, left me feeling like it does after a good rain.



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I won't ever figure myself out, I don't guess.




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Namaste.




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Dogfight

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Creation myth number ninety-two million and four.





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I was up on a ladder today swapping out light fixtures in the new bedroom. Probably my butt-crack was showing.


That is how you really look like a tradesman, if you're interested.


Anyway, now we have three big old paper moons over our heads instead of little dainty frosted glass pendants of orange and blue and green.


They looked like somebody else, man, not like us.


It's way better now.



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So, one thing I am learning is about breathing. Just taking a big breath in and holding it for a minute and then letting it out, letting it all out, slowly and fully, and pausing, and then filling up again.


It'll take five years off you, every time you do it.


Never mind the slow, full, deep, ujjayi breathing.



That will do things to you that are untoward, man.



The dog always freaks out when I do that.



She wants to get in my mouth.



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It's very spiritually creamy, let me tell you.



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Another thing is we got rid of about ten linear feet of books today. Good books, too. But they needed to find a new home. And we packed the bed of the pickup full of clothes and homewares and drove them off to the Salvation Army and gave that shit away.

Open, open, open!



We do this, I don't know, two or three times a year? We live in a 950 square foot bungalow, so we don't have a lot of extra room for shit. And we are lean. We don't bring a lot in to our home, and we mostly follow the "one in, one out" rule. But still, it piles up on us. I don't know how people who don't regularly purge can survive.

We have never once gotten rid of something and regretted it.

You get started, man, look out. It can sweep like a fire through you. Burning and purifying, destroying everything that is weak and brittle and used up, and hardening and tempering the good stuff, leaving behind only smoke and diamonds.


just like life, man.



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The house feels like all diamonds now, diamonds and the acrid smell of the conflagrated past.


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We are shorn, and stripped, and lean, and ready for it.


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Now I need a goddamn tumbler full of frozen vodka and my woman and the leather sofa and some shit to watch on the fee-vee.


Do not fuck with me, man. I will make you rue the day.



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Namaste, bitches.



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And On The Sixth Day, God Drove Hard To the Hoop

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Creation myth number seventeen thousand five hundred twelve.



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There is all kinds of madness afoot here at Casa Azul. The Woman on The Verge and I have moved almost every stick of furniture we own. This bed, out there. That bed, in here. These shelves go over there. This stuff all comes down, that stuff all goes up. This gets tossed, this other thing gets brought in.

The fucking dog is beside herself.




She don't approve.



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She strongly prefers the status quo.


The goddamn routine.



This isn't Nam, Smokey. There's fucking rules.









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All in preparation for opening, opening, opening. A home for ailing parents. A home for pregnant children. A home for babies and grannies, for the newly arrived and the soon to depart.



A way station of sorts.


"All aboard!"






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One of the coolest things about it is that we've moved our bedroom out to the studio and turned it into an oasis of calmness and serene beauty.

Check it out:

A sanctuary from which we can shelter from any storm.



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I guess we should be more freaked out than we are. But we're both oddly serene about the impending chaos. The disruption of our precious idea of a quiet home with just us and our very mellow bulldog. But life, man, it fucking asserts itself.






You cain't but hold on tight.



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You don't get to refuse anything.



You must have it all.





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Shit, I'm strong, man. I like manning the oars. Let's row this bitch to land.


It's out there somewhere.



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Namaste.




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PS- I love my wife like a goddamn house afire.



Fucking smoke and flames everywhere.



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Form and Formlessness

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So, the woman and I were talking about how to reconcile the scientific, rationalist, logical, empirical, skeptical worldview with the spiritual, non-dual, ecstatic, shamanic, buddhist, santeria, magical worldview. And it seems natural to talk about that in terms of my own evolution of thinking on the subject.

As a child, I was a magical thinker. I'm pretty sure all of us were. I believed in portals that opened to another world. I believed in Aslan and the Wardrobe and Sandworms and robots and ghosts and Superman. It seemed obvious that these things existed. You just had to know where to look, and you had to really, really believe, or the magic wouldn't work.

Then I explored the religious path. I remember very clearly watching television early on a Sunday morning before my parents were awake, four years old and watching some televangelist on a black and white screen and he was telling me I had better accept Jesus Christ as my personal savior right now and I did.

I opened my little four year old heart to Jesus and asked him to save me and told him I would believe in him and be very good and never do anything to disappoint him. And I did it again when I was eleven. Got baptized in the tepid waters of the baptismal font of the First Southern Baptist Church in Burlingame, California, under a painting of the river Jordan and the watchful eye of my Grandmother Janice.

At sixteen I had this friend of mine who was born-again in a serious way. He gave me a big old bible and we used to read it together and we would pray together, but I was already drifting away from that idea of God, and of right and wrong. It seemed like a cartoon for little children to watch. It seemed to me to be fear-based and small-minded and parochial.

So when I got to my junior and senior year in high school I was in Taiwan and I started to read a little bit about buddhism and hinduism and Confucianism and those folks seemed to be on to something with a little more substance. I read the vedas and the bhagavad gita and the tibetan book of the dead and herman hesse's Siddhartha and I even meditated with my acid-fried swim coach.

In college I explored the whole psychopharmacological approach to enlightenment. After a year and a half I was invited by the administration to explore other opportunities, especially opportunities that might be available in an off-campus setting.

So I joined the Coast Guard and entered a period of seriously grounded-in-the-real-guts-of-the-world study. I disdained religion as a balm for the simple-minded, and philosophy and meditation as an escape for those who were too weak to understand life on the level of bloody-tooth-and-claw. If a boat was on fire and people were burning and jumping into the frozen alaskan sea, you fucking pulled them out of the water and you put out the fire on their boat and you tended their wounds and you towed the smoking hulk back to port where it could be repaired. By hungover ships mechanics and still drunk crewmen. I lived in and relished a world where the sea was implacable and malevolent and utterly, utterly real.

In a way that mere thoughts and fancy ideations never could be.

And I suppose I have inhabited that world almost without pause since I became a police. It is, perhaps, the most intimate and personal relationship that I have with the world. I love it because of its physicality, its immediacy and raw power. Blood and smoke in the air, the wailing of the damaged, the snarls of the evil, the courage and power of the righteous. It is everywhere available for the senses to ascertain, and nowhere hidden, nowhere coy.

But I have yet studied. I have learned my classical, Newtonian physics. I have learned my biology and geology and neurology. I have delved yet more deeply into Buddhism and meditation and yoga and mindfulness. I have explored the mind-body problem. I have learned my quantum mechanics and my string theory and I am comfortable with the paradoxes of the multiverse and black holes and on and on.

And I have had my spiritual education. I have experienced the power of what comes from beyond the known. I have had my own initiation into the path with a heart. I have read Casteneda and believed him literally, then symbolically, then literally again. I have stood witness to events and experiences that tear asunder the veil of rationality and show the whole shebang as a dream, albeit a forceful and persistent one.

So, we come back to the question. How do we reconcile these divergent world-views? Certainly a hard-boiled scientific, rationalist perspective must demand a skeptical approach to magic and spirituality, to the power of meditation and prayer, of wishful thinking and visualization? Surely a magical shamanistic approach must deny the ability of the scientific approach to ever quantify the nature of reality?

Surely the two points of view are irreconcilable?



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Well, I'm not certain.



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Here's my provisional take on a way to get these differing views in alignment.


Let's start with acknowledging that, from an empirical, rationalist viewpoint, our own objective reality is nothing more than a very sophisticated mock-up of what the real reality might be like, that is, a reality that is not filtered and reduced and modified by our own, very limited, sensory apparatus.

Right?

I mean, light doesn't penetrate the skull. Nothing happens inside the bony vault but signals-processing work done by neurons and various combinations of peptides and neurochemicals- there is not a kind of movie screen onto which the signals input from the retinas are displayed for a little man inside the brain to watch.

It's all biochemical, physiological signals processing.


So, let's take that as our jumping off point. Next, lets look at how, on the very, very tiny, quantum scale, classical newtonian physics breaks down. A single photon approaches a barrier with two openings and goes through both of them at the same time. A pair of electrons are separated by time and distance and then one of the pair is measured by an observer, either velocity or location, and the other electron immediately collapses into the same state as the observed electron.

Look at varieties of scale, as seen fractally. No difference no matter how vast you scale up or how tiny you scale down. Look at deep time. Imagine, if you can, what fourteen billion years looks like.

I could go on and on.


The point is, the fucking universe is strange as a three-headed goat, and the more you look at it, the stranger it gets.

And think about what's going on inside us as a species. We're relative late-comers to the show, but we still have millions of years of evolutionary history packed into our DNA. If you cotton to the idea of the  conservation of energy, it's likely that there are all kinds of evolutionary ghosts riding around in the biochemical soup of our brains.

And now allow me to drag in the theory of the placebo effects. All these studies done that show if you think a certain injection is going to ease your pain, it will. And that if you think you're being given an inert ingredient and you are really given morphine, the morphine won't work very well. And if you are not aware that you're being given anything, it might not work at all.

Meditation. Prayer. Fasting. Homeopathy. Medicine men. Shamans. Yoga. Acupuncture. Trances. Shaker dances. Whirling dervishes. Holding hands. Wishful thinking. Buddhist enlightenment. Psychotropic enlightenment. Ghosts. Ouija boards. Surfing. Sword fighting.



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We are trapped by our own conscious minds, by our sensory apparatus and the major-league filtering and modeling that goes on, simply so we can have some kind of coherent experience of what we call objective reality. Vastly more stuff gets filtered out than gets admitted in, and that is of the signals that come in through our very limited sensory apparatus- humongous amounts of data we cannot even access.

Then of the tiny bit of the torrent of stuff that gets through, ninety percent or more of it all gets processed outside the conscious experience.

But it's all still there, out in the dark and slimy waters of the unconscious.




Here's how I see it:


These mystical approaches, be they meditation or prayer or magic, Christian, Buddhist, Hindu, Islamic, Satanic, yogic, what have you, they are all every bit as real and necessary as anything else. They allow us, by means of ritual and hard work, to momentarily dismantle the tyranny of the machinery of the conscious mind-

They allow us to interrupt our own dream.


These practices allow us to create a gap through which information that is kept out of awareness by the mechanisms of the conscious reality-creating mind is allowed to penetrate the veil of conscious awareness.

Because it comes from outside the conscious mind, it is interpreted by the conscious mind as something other than itself. But it is not, not really.

And this is why the other than information is always coded in a sociologically congruent way by the conscious mind. Christians see angels and hear the voice of God. Buddhists see Buddha and taste enlightenment. Lakota Sioux see wakan tanka circling round. Physicians think they're hallucinating, or having a stroke.

The critical point is that this information, this other than information that is accessed by prayer, meditation, fasting, or simple intention, is valid and real.


Or exactly as valid and real as our own vivid and imaginary dream of objective reality imposed upon us by our faulty and limited sensory apparatus and cognitive framework.


Everything is provisional. Everything is fuzzy on a quantum level. Everything is vastly odder and more complex than we are capable of imagining.

I used to think that religion was a child's way of seeing the world, and for the most part, I still do. I like something with a little more bite and pizzaz. So I lay claim to the structure of Buddhism and the path of meditation and physical yoga. But I keep my eyes open for more. I keep my heart open for magic.

I look for portals to another world.


*



Our minds are playing a trick on us.



We need to play back if we're to have any hope at all.



*





Namaste.




***

Las Hermanas Del Olvido

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"Look at us. Look at what they make you give."


                                            The Professor, The Bourne Identity





























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Namaste.






***

Kynodonta

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In honor of the return of The Woman on the Verge, a special dance.




It pretty much sums up what happens to my insides when I see her.



*


I have laid in supplies for the trip to retrieve her from the heavier than air flying machine and the various minions and henchmen who have sworn to stop me in my quest....

*




Soon, all will be back to the way it should be:

*

You will forgive me if I drop off the radar for a while.

*

Namaste.

*

Bleak Island

*











































*







i thought those girls needed a little bit of space and silence, although it looks like they might have cornered the market on both already.








still.....








*



I miss my wife. I'm all miswired.




She's been on the hero's journey. Facing the mean old nasty dragon. She's getting all crispy around the edges and smoke inhalation and red eyes. Sword all nicked and dull-edged and battered. Shield lumped up, boots a mess, lip balm almost used up.






Still, my money ain't on the dragon.






*




I can't see the path ahead, but I can hear the rustling of unnamed beasts in the deep of the wood.













We can't rest here, we must go in.



***



Namaste.



***

Knockaround Boys

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One Man's Saturday:

1. Dog medicated and walked and petted.
2. Weekend breakfast made and consumed.
3. Load of whites soaking in hot water.
4. Pot of strong coffee drunk.
5. Vacuum standing by in living room.
6. All rugs out on the back deck. 
7. Drapes opened. Ditto windows. Ditto back door. Ditto front door.
8. O'Keefe & Merritt pulled out from wall, standing by for field stripping, cleaning, and repair of the grillevator.
9. Tub prepped, towels standing by for washing of the dog.
10. Scott's housecleaning playlist ramped up on iTunes.
11. Scott likes to rock the party.
12. Water softener switched off, hose out ready to water the way back and central beds.
13. Fucking awesome artwork committed. 
14. Ketel One standing by in the freezer.
15. Shrimps thawing for dinner, awaiting the wok.
16. Yoga mat and bolster cleaned, ready for action. Or inaction. What do you call lying down and breathing very deeply and slowly for half an hour? Either way, it's heaven. 
17. BBC's Story of The Universe queued up on Netflix.
18. Time's Arrow and Archemedies Point by Huw Price standing by on the nightstand. 

*

"Ready, steady, Go!"

*

PS is them boyos tough or what?

*

Namaste.

***