Aimless Wandering's topics - tribe.net

Standing on the Precipice of 2012...

2009-09-27T23:18:57Z

Ah, with 4 years and some change to go, the effects of the timewave zero have been in full effect. I have seen first hand how folks who have been losing their jobs, have had time to reflect, and beautiful changes are coming from within. People really are tapping into their intuition and learning to love themselves, this is something so wondrous to witness. After working in Nicaragua for the last year, I find myself back in New York and wanting to wander freely again. Have walked lightly and lovingly in Oceania, Europe, North and Central America, and just dreaming the next phase of the journey. Part of me feels like, grounding in Mexico until 2012 is wise, as this is the source of the 6th Sun vision, although places like Peru and Arizona, reflect these teachings as well.
In closing, just looking to surrender, wander, meditate, work but just to live simply, not some hippie Mecca, but somewhere special like
Mt. Shasta, California, which I guess might border on such a "Hippie Mecca" but more of a vortex of great serenity...
Just want to put my feelers out there, I know my intuition will guide me to be in the right place, but if there are any kind souls, who may have found some special, tender, loving community, that has some fun but epic beauty, out of the U.S. before a possible 09' Mega Crash,
I would love to hear some opinions...

*DISCLAIMER- Just to throw it out there, I am not seeking a lecture on behalf of being an imperialistic source that is plaguing the world, I am coming in a humble way and just want to hear where some folks are at. If you are looking to take out your frustrations of how dense your earth walk is, just dream a new dream or, might I urge you to learn to write feasibility reports and begin to submit them to the WTO, private corporations, or your local body of government. I say this because I found some streams to become a "SUPER-CONSCIOUS" competition, of who is the most aware individual, I am not seeking your input. Something like, "Eating Ayahuasca in Peru for the next 4 years sounds amazing, I loved the people there!" is the tone I am seeking. So if you feel the fuzzy bubble to bust out a healing vortex, epic, if not, please just carry on... Thanks in advance...

posted in Aimless Wandering - 4 replies

Dancing the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil

2009-08-23T01:20:05Z

I wish that I didn’t have to be an ancient, reincarnated, bristle cone, grandfather, guru. I get tired of already knowing everyone and everything. Sometimes I can forget and everything is new and unknown, it’s a different kind of magick when all things are new and unknown. This time I was fortunate enough to cover my memories and remembrances with a thick, heavy blanket of snow, helping to chill the past cycles.

The problem with the forgetting devices that I lay ahead of time is that I remember. This is such a tactile dimension! So many senses to engage with remembrance. Sometimes to forget for a while I wrap myself up in heavy blankets, curl up into a ball and stare off into space or just fall asleep, slipping into a dark, barren and cold winter.

I am from the winter, and my blood line has an interesting mixture of northern and southern tribes, the truly magickal opposites. An alchemy of north and south, fire and ice. Most people think that it’s east and west. Thats just a lateral distraction, deceitful diversions crafted by our “keepers.”

They are our keepers because we let them. We allow it on so many levels. I keep coming back to make sure they don’t get too far out of line.

Where are my robes? Where is my hearth? What are we doing this for? Everything has gotten so detached and disjointed. It is almost not worth returning to anymore. I will keep my word though. We have a long way to go yet.

Too bad we will have to go through so much pain and suffering before its all done. I always wonder why we have to be so thick headed, why does it take so much repetition and circles before we get the idea.

When will all the dreams and symbols become clear, as we gaze proudly and even arrogantly at the past cultures and civilizations, many of which are still living and crying out to us to wake up and see? A dead, sleeping people see everything as dead, lifeless artifacts. Do you remember when we danced around the fire for days? Running through the forest screaming and yelling the songs of our land, dancing with the elk?

We used to swim out beyond the reef together, diving deeper and deeper to see who could hold their breath the longest and to see who could translate into the deeper realms first, anxious to visit with our ancestors and all our brothers and sisters from the inner realms.

It is kind of lonely to have to wait so long and to have to keep repeating ourselves. You ask for teachings and knowledge, we tell you straight out, giving you what you need, but you don’t understand it.

I am going to go wrap myself in a blanket for a while and dream the sun to rise. Maybe we will cross paths again tomorrow.

posted in Aimless Wandering - 0 replies

CHAPTER TWO

2008-12-19T21:37:37Z

If you want to read CHapter one, its inGETTING LOST. Just below.
What follows is a document report on the Aimless wandering of mine which began when I attempted to Get to Mexico on the Day Syd Barrett died...
___I___I___ -timeframe commencing April 2007
The cheap beer was running out in the abandoned clothes factory in Thessalonika, occupied with a BMX range, for various Anarchist groups we had been working on an organic farm project, and (I had been staying in an abandoned old house elsewhere in the city, cross dressing in some stuff I cobbled together.
Six of us were to travel across the Balkan states of Eastern Europe, A fire spinning Yogi who had been in turkey(German) A Greek couple from Athens Mikales& Athina, a juggler street performer from the Czech Rep.(Theresa, The Vans owner Bernie, it had been recently sprayed professionally, an Orange truck cab, and myself, a hopeless busker/squatter/writer from U.K.The dust flew as the van acelleerated out of the vast space of the squat yard.
Macedonia... A vastly natural country with few towns, mountains surrounding the slim road. Eight hours driving we were at the Serbian border. The van was held up for two hours while they searched us for drugs. Border police rifling through our personal possessions, I was about to be revealed as a transvestite when I used the excuse that I had a circus costume in my bag. So on our way through Serbia we mished. Serbian roads are evil and have highway birders which charge Extortionate money every fifty kilometers or so. So we hit the rough roads. No seatbelts in the cab, the truck bouncing along the potholes. Overnight we were chsased out of a feild by a serbian farmer waving a pitchfork, and the next day reached Beograd(Belgrade).
Bullet holes and bombshell impacts were still visible in the facades of city buildings from the 1993 war as we headed down to the centre to busk up some change. We got there only to be hopelessly outclassed by a circus troop in the main shop street? unicyclists, jugglers, clowns, Theresa began talking to them, and they invited us for a beer in the park. We ended up staying at their place for three days. Colorful liars was the name of the troop, they were acrobats, iknife jugglers, circus girls and boys who travelled around every summer to the four states their passports would allow them to, to perform festivals withDJs & bands. They were groovy, and after a cool time learning to juggle, and performing in the late night street with them, it was time to hit the highway.
Through Hungary, plain speed drivin, camping the Slovakian border overnight (as I had over new year 2002, alone; less snow this time), we came to our eventual destination- Prague. where we split up, people had to see their familys, I was out of petrol fare ( I only had five bucks the whoole way) and there was a legalise marijuanna protest about to go down. Late night industrial bar in Prague(coolest fuckin bar I have ever seen in my life, free entry everybody on drugs, sculptures made of about two hundred butchered motorvehicle engines, MACHINA TURNS). I was staying at a squat Theresa ( who didnt like me in the end ) had given me the address of. Dark place. Black magick scrawls on the walls, and the power had been out a while so bands couldnt gig the bar no more.
Then after we said our goodbyes, and discovered busking had been made illegal in Prague, after, even, I failed to gatecrash a festival, passing it by thinking it was too municipal; it turned out Transglobal underground and Clawfinger(who rock, I bought their record for 90p, and it ruled) were both giggeing. So I missed that shit, and couldnt find the legalise it march, but got to the post Demo gig, where huge bush plants were placed in front of Drum and bass& band stages, with about ten thousand people all smoking pot on this hillside park in Prague.
One heavily stoned day later and whilst I was sitting in the late nite cinema tent watching "a scanner darkly"(which is shot like an ACID PEAK, I still havent seen the end) an alarm klaxon went off and someone shouted "COPS!" and all the gear was hussled away along with the people.
After some downtown busking, it was tiime to hock a train to Berlin, I still had some contacts there who I met in 2002, hadnt seen them for five years...
Pending CHAPTER THREE...........................To Be COntinued timeframe June 2007

posted in Aimless Wandering - 3 replies

getting lost

2008-01-07T15:57:58Z

everything is sparkling
a bucket
a shoe
a wet rag

sometimes i get lost just to experience the fresh.

posted in Aimless Wandering - 2 replies

Bannishings or Grounding..... another, more long-term function.

2007-12-12T05:56:30Z

I recently came across an essay by Stephen Mace that really clicked and reminded me of various meditations that were similar to his version of a simple banishing.

I am gonna post an excerpt of a few reasons for banishing along with why one might decide to banish that are a little different from the common ritual reasons. I will post his simple banishing as well.

I am wondering what you guys are doing along these lines and for what reasons. What kinds of variations do you know and what do you find effective for various situations?

Here goes some excerpts from Mace...

"...banishing rituals also have another, more long-term function. Through their habitual repetition (three or four times a day for the rest of your life), they build up your aura so it becomes impervious to external psychic currents, unless you deliberately choose to let them influence you. Then weather you banish on any particular occasion or not, you will find yourself less susceptible to fads, authority, the enthusiasm of crowds, and the beliefs imposed by politicians, advertisers, and consensus reality in general. Such a diamond-hard aura will allow nothing but your own will to influence you as you create the reality you need to carry you through life."

The banishing...

" To begin, concentrate your thought in the point between your ears and behind your eyes.
Imagine a vertical line of light passing through it from beneath your feet to about ten centimeters above the top of your head.
Imagine a spot of light about thirty centimeters in front of your point of view. Use this spot to trace a circle around your head.
Then use it to trace an ellipse from in front of your face, over the top of your head, down your back, under your feet, and up the front of your body to the top of your head.
Finally, use it to trace a third ellipse from down the right side of your body, under your feet, and up the left side to the top of your head. You should now be in the center of a cage of light....
With your defenses in place, all you need to do is burn out your aura. To do this, transform the vertical line you first visualized into a pillar of fire. Let it expand out through the three rings, burning up any and all thoughts and images until there is nothing left but the three rings glowing blue-white."

I am sure that whatever tradition you are working in, you can see parallels with this. Maybe the points and lines or perhaps colors or some missing colors, lines or different directions. Of course this can be elaborated on or adapted.

I am also wondering if anyone know exactly what tradition Mace is getting his version from.

posted in Aimless Wandering - 6 replies

Does Objective Reality Exist, or is the Universe a Phantasm?

2007-12-12T05:48:55Z

The Universe as a Hologram
by Michael Talbot

Does Objective Reality Exist, or is the Universe a Phantasm?

In 1982 a remarkable event took place. At the University of Paris a research team led by physicist Alain Aspect performed what may turn out to be one of the most important experiments of the 20th century. You did not hear about it on the evening news. In fact, unless you are in the habit of reading scientific journals you probably have never even heard Aspect's name, though there are some who believe his discovery may change the face of science.
Aspect and his team discovered that under certain circumstances subatomic particles such as electrons are able to instantaneously communicate with each other regardless of the distance separating them. It doesn't matter whether they are 10 feet or 10 billion miles apart. Somehow each particle always seems to know what the other is doing. The problem with this feat is that it violates Einstein's long-held tenet that no communication can travel faster than the speed of light. Since traveling faster than the speed of light is tantamount to breaking the time barrier, this daunting prospect has caused some physicists to try to come up with elaborate ways to explain away Aspect's findings. But it has inspired others to offer even more radical explanations.
University of London physicist David Bohm, for example, believes Aspect's findings imply that objective reality does not exist, that despite its apparent solidity the universe is at heart a phantasm, a gigantic and splendidly detailed hologram.
To understand why Bohm makes this startling assertion, one must first understand a little about holograms. A hologram is a three- dimensional photograph made with the aid of a laser. To make a hologram, the object to be photographed is first bathed in the light of a laser beam. Then a second laser beam is bounced off the reflected light of the first and the resulting interference pattern (the area where the two laser beams commingle) is captured on film. When the film is developed, it looks like a meaningless swirl of light and dark lines. But as soon as the developed film is illuminated by another laser beam, a three-dimensional image of the original object appears.
The three-dimensionality of such images is not the only remarkable characteristic of holograms. If a hologram of a rose is cut in half and then illuminated by a laser, each half will still be found to contain the entire image of the rose. Indeed, even if the halves are divided again, each snippet of film will always be found to contain a smaller but intact version of the original image. Unlike normal photographs, every part of a hologram contains all the information possessed by the whole.
The "whole in every part" nature of a hologram provides us with an entirely new way of understanding organization and order. For most of its history, Western science has labored under the bias that the best way to understand a physical phenomenon, whether a frog or an atom, is to dissect it and study its respective parts. A hologram teaches us that some things in the universe may not lend themselves to this approach. If we try to take apart something constructed holographically, we will not get the pieces of which it is made, we will only get smaller wholes.
This insight suggested to Bohm another way of understanding Aspect's discovery. Bohm believes the reason subatomic particles are able to remain in contact with one another regardless of the distance separating them is not because they are sending some sort of mysterious signal back and forth, but because their separateness is an illusion. He argues that at some deeper level of reality such particles are not individual entities, but are actually extensions of the same fundamental something.
To enable people to better visualize what he means, Bohm offers the following illustration. Imagine an aquarium containing a fish. Imagine also that you are unable to see the aquarium directly and your knowledge about it and what it contains comes from two television cameras, one directed at the aquarium's front and the other directed at its side. As you stare at the two television monitors, you might assume that the fish on each of the screens are separate entities. After all, because the cameras are set at different angles, each of the images will be slightly different. But as you continue to watch the two fish, you will eventually become aware that there is a certain relationship between them. When one turns, the other also makes a slightly different but corresponding turn; when one faces the front, the other always faces toward the side. If you remain unaware of the full scope of the situation, you might even conclude that the fish must be instantaneously communicating with one another, but this is clearly not the case.
This, says Bohm, is precisely what is going on between the subatomic particles in Aspect's experiment. According to Bohm, the apparent faster-than-light connection between subatomic particles is really telling us that there is a deeper level of reality we are not privy to, a more complex dimension beyond our own that is analogous to the aquarium. And, he adds, we view objects such as subatomic particles as separate from one another because we are seeing only a portion of their reality. Such particles are not separate "parts", but facets of a deeper and more underlying unity that is ultimately as holographic and indivisible as the previously mentioned rose. And since everything in physical reality is comprised of these "eidolons", the universe is itself a projection, a hologram.
In addition to its phantomlike nature, such a universe would possess other rather startling features. If the apparent separateness of subatomic particles is illusory, it means that at a deeper level of reality all things in the universe are infinitely interconnected.The electrons in a carbon atom in the human brain are connected to the subatomic particles that comprise every salmon that swims, every heart that beats, and every star that shimmers in the sky. Everything interpenetrates everything, and although human nature may seek to categorize and pigeonhole and subdivide, the various phenomena of the universe, all apportionments are of necessity artificial and all of nature is ultimately a seamless web.
In a holographic universe, even time and space could no longer be viewed as fundamentals. Because concepts such as location break down in a universe in which nothing is truly separate from anything else, time and three-dimensional space, like the images of the fish on the TV monitors, would also have to be viewed as projections of this deeper order. At its deeper level reality is a sort of superhologram in which the past, present, and future all exist simultaneously. This suggests that given the proper tools it might even be possible to someday reach into the superholographic level of reality and pluck out scenes from the long-forgotten past.
What else the superhologram contains is an open-ended question. Allowing, for the sake of argument, that the superhologram is the matrix that has given birth to everything in our universe, at the very least it contains every subatomic particle that has been or will be -- every configuration of matter and energy that is possible, from snowflakes to quasars, from blue whales to gamma rays. It must be seen as a sort of cosmic storehouse of "All That Is."
Although Bohm concedes that we have no way of knowing what else might lie hidden in the superhologram, he does venture to say that we have no reason to assume it does not contain more. Or as he puts it, perhaps the superholographic level of reality is a "mere stage" beyond which lies "an infinity of further development".

Bohm is not the only researcher who has found evidence that the universe is a hologram. Working independently in the field of brain research, Standford neurophysiologist Karl Pribram has also become persuaded of the holographic nature of reality. Pribram was drawn to the holographic model by the puzzle of how and where memories are stored in the brain. For decades numerous studies have shown that rather than being confined to a specific location, memories are dispersed throughout the brain.
In a series of landmark experiments in the 1920s, brain scientist Karl Lashley found that no matter what portion of a rat's brain he removed he was unable to eradicate its memory of how to perform complex tasks it had learned prior to surgery. The only problem was that no one was able to come up with a mechanism that might explain this curious "whole in every part" nature of memory storage.
Then in the 1960s Pribram encountered the concept of holography and realized he had found the explanation brain scientists had been looking for. Pribram believes memories are encoded not in neurons, or small groupings of neurons, but in patterns of nerve impulses that crisscross the entire brain in the same way that patterns of laser light interference crisscross the entire area of a piece of film containing a holographic image. In other words, Pribram believes the brain is itself a hologram.
Pribram's theory also explains how the human brain can store so many memories in so little space. It has been estimated that the human brain has the capacity to memorize something on the order of 10 billion bits of information during the average human lifetime (or roughly the same amount of information contained in five sets of the Encyclopaedia Britannica).
Similarly, it has been discovered that in addition to their other capabilities, holograms possess an astounding capacity for information storage--simply by changing the angle at which the two lasers strike a piece of photographic film, it is possible to record many different images on the same surface. It has been demonstrated that one cubic centimeter of film can hold as many as 10 billion bits of information.
Our uncanny ability to quickly retrieve whatever information we need from the enormous store of our memories becomes more understandable if the brain functions according to holographic principles. If a friend asks you to tell him what comes to mind when he says the word "zebra", you do not have to clumsily sort back through some gigantic and cerebral alphabetic file to arrive at an answer. Instead, associations like "striped", "horselike", and "animal native to Africa" all pop into your head instantly. Indeed, one of the most amazing things about the human thinking process is that every piece of information seems instantly cross- correlated with every other piece of information--another feature intrinsic to the hologram. Because every portion of a hologram is infinitely interconnected with every other portion, it is perhaps nature's supreme example of a cross-correlated system.
The storage of memory is not the only neurophysiological puzzle that becomes more tractable in light of Pribram's holographic model of the brain. Another is how the brain is able to translate the avalanche of frequencies it receives via the senses (light frequencies, sound frequencies, and so on) into the concrete world of our perceptions.
Encoding and decoding frequencies is precisely what a hologram does best. Just as a hologram functions as a sort of lens, a translating device able to convert an apparently meaningless blur of frequencies into a coherent image, Pribram believes the brain also comprises a lens and uses holographic principles to mathematically convert the frequencies it receives through the senses into the inner world of our perceptions.

An impressive body of evidence suggests that the brain uses holographic principles to perform its operations. Pribram's theory, in fact, has gained increasing support among neurophysiologists.
Argentinian-Italian researcher Hugo Zucarelli recently extended the holographic model into the world of acoustic phenomena. Puzzled by the fact that humans can locate the source of sounds without moving their heads, even if they only possess hearing in one ear, Zucarelli discovered that holographic principles can explain this ability. Zucarelli has also developed the technology of holophonic sound, a recording technique able to reproduce acoustic situations with an almost uncanny realism.

Pribram's belief that our brains mathematically construct "hard" reality by relying on input from a frequency domain has also received a good deal of experimental support. It has been found that each of our senses is sensitive to a much broader range of frequencies than was previously suspected. Researchers have discovered, for instance, that our visual systems are sensitive to sound frequencies, that our sense of smellisin part dependent on what are now called "osmic frequencies", and that even the cells in our bodies are sensitive to a broad range of frequencies. Such findings suggest that it is only in the holographic domain of consciousness that such frequencies are sorted out and divided up into conventional perceptions.

But the most mind-boggling aspect of Pribram's holographic model of the brain is what happens when it is put together with Bohm's theory. For if the concreteness of the world is but a secondary reality and what is "there" is actually a holographic blur of frequencies, and if the brain is also a hologram and only selects some of the frequencies out of this blur and mathematically transforms them into sensory perceptions, what becomes of objective reality? Put quite simply, it ceases to exist. As the religions of the East have long upheld, the material world is Maya, an illusion, and although we may think we are physical beings moving through a physical world, this too is an illusion.
We are really "receivers" floating through a kaleidoscopic sea of frequency, and what we extract from this sea and transmogrify into physical reality is but one channel from many extracted out of the superhologram.
This striking new picture of reality, the synthesis of Bohm and Pribram's views, has come to be called the-holographic paradigm, and although many scientists have greeted it with skepticism, it has galvanized others. A small but growing group of researchers believe it may be the most accurate model of reality science has arrived at thus far. More than that, some believe it may solve some mysteries that have never before been explainable by science and even establish the paranormal as a part of nature. Numerous researchers, including Bohm and Pribram, have noted that many para-psychological phenomena become much more understandable in terms of the holographic paradigm.

In a universe in which individual brains are actually indivisible portions of the greater hologram and everything is infinitely interconnected, telepathy may merely be the accessing of the holographic level.
It is obviously much easier to understand how information can travel from the mind of individual 'A' to that of individual 'B' at a far distance point and helps to understand a number of unsolvedpuzzles in psychology.
In particular, Stanislav Grof feels the holographic paradigm offers a model for understanding many of the baffling phenomena experienced by individuals during altered states of consciousness. In the 1950s, while conducting research into the beliefs of LSD as a psychotherapeutic tool, Grof had one female patient who suddenly became convinced she had assumed the identity of a female of a species of prehistoric reptile. During the course of her hallucination, she not only gave a richly detailed description of what it felt like to be encapsuled in such a form, but noted that the portion of the male of the species's anatomy was a patch of colored scales on the side of its head. What was startling to Grof was that although the woman had no prior knowledge about such things, a conversation with a zoologist later confirmed that in certain species of reptiles colored areas on the head do indeed play an important role as triggers of sexual arousal. The woman's experience was not unique. During the course of his research, Grof encountered examples of patients regressing and identifying with virtually every species on the evolutionary tree (research findings which helped influence the man-into-ape scene in the movie Altered States). Moreover, he found that such experiences frequently contained obscure zoological details which turned out to be accurate.
Regressions into the animal kingdom were not the only puzzling psychological phenomena Grof encountered. He also had patients who appeared to tap into some sort of collective or racial unconscious. Individuals with little or no education suddenly gave detailed descriptions of Zoroastrian funerary practices and scenes from Hindu mythology. In other categories of experience, individuals gave persuasive accounts of out-of-body journeys, of precognitive glimpses of the future, of regressions into apparent past-life incarnations.
In later research, Grof found the same range of phenomena manifested in therapy sessions which did not involve the use of drugs. Because the common element in such experiences appeared to be the transcending of an individual's consciousness beyond the usual boundaries of ego and/or limitations of space and time, Grof called such manifestations "transpersonal experiences", and in the late '60s he helped found a branch of psychology called "transpersonal psychology" devoted entirely to their study.
Although Grof's newly founded Association of Transpersonal Psychology garnered a rapidly growing group of like-minded professionals and has become a respected branch of psychology, for years neither Grof or any of his colleagues were able to offer a mechanism for explaining the bizarre psychological phenomena they were witnessing. But that has changed with the advent of the holographic paradigm.
As Grof recently noted, if the mind is actually part of a continuum, a labyrinth that is connected not only to every other mind that exists or has existed, but to every atom, organism, and region in the vastness of space and time itself, the fact that it is able to occasionally make forays into the labyrinth and have transpersonal experiences no longer seems so strange.
The holographic paradigm also has implications for so-called hard sciences like biology. Keith Floyd, a psychologist at Virginia Intermont College, has pointed out that if the concreteness of reality is but a holographic illusion, it would no longer be true to say the brain produces consciousness. Rather, it is consciousness that creates the appearance of the brain -- as well as the body and everything else around us we interpret as physical.
Such a turnabout in the way we view biological structures has caused researchers to point out that medicine and our understanding of the healing process could also be transformed by the holographic paradigm. If the apparent physical structure of the body is but a holographic projection of consciousness, it becomes clear that each of us is much more responsible for our health than current medical wisdom allows. What we now view as miraculous remissions of disease may actually be due to changes in consciousness which in turn effect changes in the hologram of the body.
Similarly, controversial new healing techniques such as visualization may work so well because, in the holographic domain of thought, images are ultimately as real as "reality".

Even visions and experiences involving "non-ordinary" reality become explainable under the holographic paradigm. In his book "Gifts of Unknown Things," biologist Lyall Watson describes his encounter with an Indonesian shaman woman who, by performing a ritual dance, was able to make an entire grove of trees instantly vanish into thin air. Watson relates that as he and another astonished onlooker continued to watch the woman, she caused the trees to reappear, then "click" off again and on again several times in succession.

Although current scientific understanding is incapable of explaining such events, experiences like this become more tenable if "hard" reality is only a holographic projection. Perhaps we agree on what is "there" or "not there" because what we call consensus reality is formulated and ratified at the level of the human unconscious at which all minds are infinitely interconnected. If this is true, it is the most profound implication of the holographic paradigm of all, for it means that experiences such as Watson's are not commonplace only because we have not programmed our minds with the beliefs that would make them so. In a holographic universe there are no limits to the extent to which we can alter the fabric of reality.

What we perceive as reality is only a canvas waiting for us to draw upon it any picture we want. Anything is possible, from bending spoons with the power of the mind to the phantasmagoric events experienced by Castaneda during his encounters with the Yaqui brujo don Juan, for magic is our birthright, no more or less miraculous than our ability to compute the reality we want when we are in our dreams.
Indeed, even our most fundamental notions about reality become suspect, for in a holographic universe, as Pribram has pointed out, even random events would have to be seen as based on holographic principles and therefore determined. Synchronicities or meaningful coincidences suddenly makes sense, and everything in reality would have to be seen as a metaphor, for even the most haphazard events would express some underlying symmetry.

Whether Bohm and Pribram's holographic paradigm becomes accepted in science or dies an ignoble death remains to be seen, but it is safe to say that it has already had an influence on the thinking of many scientists. And even if it is found that the holographic model does not provide the best explanation for the instantaneous communications that seem to be passing back and forth between subatomic particles, at the very least, as noted by Basil Hiley, a physicist at Birbeck College in London, Aspect's findings "indicate that we must be prepared to consider radically new views of reality".

Bruce Lee

posted in Aimless Wandering - 9 replies

September 11th anniversary general strike

2007-09-01T19:07:22Z

Via: http://mothermedia.org/

September 11th anniversary general strike.

A National Call to Action: Tuesday, September 11th, 2007
No school. No work. Buy nothing. Stay home or hit the streets.
No business as usual.

Get more information at http://strike911.org , http://truthaction.org , http://wearechange.org and http://powertothepeaceful.org

posted in Aimless Wandering - 0 replies

IRC chat

2007-06-06T15:16:33Z

I am wondering if folks use a particular irc channel or know of any good ones. I am considering opening one at irc://deoxy.org/ called #madyoga, in other words; irc://deoxy.org/madyoga. I will open this room whenever online and welcome any of you to do the same so that it can stay open and grow.

what think ye?

posted in Aimless Wandering - 1 reply

Viet Nam Info?

2007-03-03T17:59:23Z

Lookin for info about traveling in Nam. Places of interest, beaches, transportation, etc.......any knowledge would be appreciated, thanks

posted in Aimless Wandering - 0 replies

0 o 0

2006-11-21T15:42:29Z

Be sure to visit flux64.wordpress.com/

posted in Aimless Wandering - 3 replies

They Thought They Were Free

2006-09-29T23:46:00Z

view with hyperlinks: http://flux64.wordpress.com/2006/09/29/they-thought-they-were-free/

{Editor’s Note: It’s remarkable how closely America’s current decent into a police state parallels that of Germany in the 1930s. The Illuminati is following the German Nazification model here in America down to the smallest detail. It’s important to note that the fascists manipulating Germany from a democracy into a dictatorship in the 1930’s did so by constantly bombarding their population with a fast moving stream of “crisis’” news items and staged ‘crisis’ events to keep the German populace bewildered and in a state of anxiety so they would not have a chance to think about and react to the unfolding political realities and collectively act to resist the fascist agenda. The same psychological manipulations are taking place in America today and producing the same results.

If you are a regular reader of this web site, you already know that “the news” we get from mainstream media outlets is scripted, edited, and tailored to function as propaganda under the auspices of the Tavistock Institute in London who are in turn directed by the Committee of 300. You already know that the major ‘crisis’ news items are themselves staged events: 911, the first World Trade Center bombing in 1993, the Oklahoma City bombing, the Bali bombing, the embassy bombings in Africa, the Madrid train bombing, the ‘anthrax letters’ (October 2001, as an excuse for stampeding through the unconstitutional Traitor’s Act {Orwellian title: “The Patriot Act”}, and similar ‘crisis’ news events were carried out by operatives and agents of the CIA, Mossad, military special forces, civilian ‘black ops’ contractors, etc.

I hope you also realize by now that most radio talk shows are intended to function as either propaganda outlets to promote the Illuminati’s ‘illusion masquerading as reality’ agenda or to produce alarm and anxiety in their listeners in order to serve the ‘fear production/inability to think’ manipulation mentioned above. All of those fascinating interviews we hear on the radio about the impending oil shortage from the likes of Michael Ruppert (CIA family) or the calamitous predictions we get from Father Andrew Wingate (military background) or the Nostradamus predictions, or the Ed Dames crap or the coming ‘plagues’ of Bird Flu, West Nile, etc., or the fearsome ‘coronal mass ejections’ from the sun or the ‘inevitable’ asteroid collisions with Earth and similar ’science news’ we get from Tavistock directed propagandist Michio Kaku, etc., are ALL intended to produce fear and anxiety, although those voices of doom and gloom would vigorously deny that was their intention. I still listen to many such radio interviews, of course, but they no longer cause me anxiety or alarm. Rather, they provide me with intelligence information about the person promoting the propaganda, or the direction of the disinformation/misinformation, or the intended plans of the treasonous manipulators and it gives me an opportunity to plan ahead or to think about a solution or countermeasure to thwart the staged disasters being ‘predicted’, etc.

You should also keep in mind that there are hundreds of web sites which are under covert control and intentionally promote fear or anxiety (while pretending to ‘enlighten’) while many other web sites act as unwitting pawns for the dark side and parrot the doom and gloom hysteria of the above ilk. Note well that the author of the article below mentions that the German people of the 1930s were kept ‘busy’ and ‘fascinated’ with continuous changes, with ‘crisis’ news and with tales of national enemies. Don’t allow yourself to be manipulated this way into passivity and inaction. Take a stand and get involved with the task of defeating the satanic minions who are attempting to destroy America and its people. Anyone can simply apply their will, their mind, their intentions, and their prayers ( a prayer is a petition for help and assistance) to defeating the destructive agenda. Read the fascinating e-mails I’ve posted recently from ordinary people who find that they can effect remarkable changes using only their minds and their intentions! The possibilities offered by Philip Ledoux’s recent dowsing session concerning sylphs and chemtrails presents even greater encouragement for ‘mind action’. Read what Don Croft and associates are accomplishing at http://www.ethericwarriors.com if you want to see how really effective this mind ‘work’ can be.

Today (Sunday, April 25, 2005), I enjoyed yet another gorgeous day in southern California of dark blue skies filled with real, bright white puffy clouds without a chemtrail line to be seen anywhere. It was the fourth or fifth consecutive day we’ve had of beautify skies, free of chemtrails. Prior to that, we had chemtrails being laid down recently, but we also had Sylphs flooding in immediately to destroy those chemtrails and prevent the chemtrail overcast and haze out that we were so accustomed to prior to Don & Carol Croft’s wonderful observations about orgone generators and their effects on the atmosphere, on bodies of water, on microwave ‘cell phone’ towers, on nuclear power plants, on building structures which house dark activities, on negative aliens, on demonic influences, and on people’s emotional outlook and sense of optimism. Think about how you can assist in the upsetting the apple cart of the New World Order and defeating the game plan of our domestic traitors. Become determined. Become dedicated. Become involved. Become alive! ..Ken]

By Milton Mayer
http://educate-yourself.org/
http://educate-yourself.org/cn/thoughttheywerefree20apr05.shtml
April 20, 2005

from: http://www.thirdreich.net/Thought_They_Were_Free.html

posted in Aimless Wandering - 0 replies

Dig this!

2006-09-10T22:17:21Z

Dig this song here on my space...

http://www.myspace.com/haveyouhadenough

free download.

posted in Aimless Wandering - 0 replies

the art of doing nothing

2006-07-14T03:10:13Z

http://www.biroco.com/

posted in Aimless Wandering - 2 replies

the wests response to five thousand years of hindu tradition

2006-06-08T21:44:38Z

http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=-539494356902515868&q=yoga

posted in Aimless Wandering - 0 replies

Pod casts

2006-06-07T03:35:30Z

I came across these on The Tao Bums forum... http://www.thetaobums.com/index.php?showtopic=1713&st=0&gopid=15673&#entry15673

You may wish to give them a listen.

http://in.integralinstitute.org/whatsnew.aspx

http://www.hardlight.org/podcast/

You may wish to give them a listen.

Also add any goodies you know of here.

posted in Aimless Wandering - 0 replies

secret yogic teaching

2006-05-27T03:44:25Z

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fp-oJhBxn6o&eurl=http%3A%2F%2Fwww%2Esalon%2Ecom%2Fent%2Fvideo%5Fdog%2F

posted in Aimless Wandering - 0 replies

Surveillance Camera Players

2006-05-14T07:27:01Z

http://www.notbored.org/the-scp.html

posted in Aimless Wandering - 0 replies

Aimless Wandering

2006-05-03T03:56:01Z

Aimless Wandering: Chuang Tzu's Chaos Linguistics

The bait is the means to get the fish where you want it, catch the fish and you forget the bait. The snare is the means to get the rabbit where you want it, catch the rabbit and forget the snare. Words are the means to get the idea where you want it, catch on to the idea and you forget about the words. Where shall I find a man who forgets about words, and have a word with him?
-Chuang Tzu

Does Taoism have a "metaphysics"?

Certainly later Taoism, influenced by Buddhism and Neo-Confucianism, developed elaborate cosmology, ontology, theology, teleology, and eschatology - but can these "medieval accretions" be read back into the classic texts, the Tao Te Ching, the Chuang Tzu, or the Lieh Tzu?

Well, yes and no. Religious Taoism certainly established such a back-reading. But, as J. Needham pointed out, the Maoists of our century were able to evolve a Marxist reading of Taoism, or at least of the Tao Te Ching. No doubt any reading of a "spiritual" text may have some validity (since the spirit is by definition indefinable); the Tao Te Ching has proved especially malleable.

But Chuang Tzu not only has no metaphysics, he actually condemns and derides metaphysics. Supernaturalism and materialism both appear equally funny to him. His only cosmogonic principle is "chaos". Oddly enough the only philosophical tool he uses is logic - although it is the logic of dream. He makes no mention of divine principle, of the purpose of being, or personal immortality. He is beyond Good and Evil, sneers at ethics, and even makes fun of yoga.

The Chuang Tzu must surely be unique amongst all religious scripture for its remarkable ANTI-metaphysics. It qualifies as "revelation" not because it unveils hidden knowledge from "outside" the self - as other scriptures claim to do - but because it transmits a sure way to "spiritual realization", SELF-realization, in this lifetime, in this body, in this daily life. If this way or method can be summed up in one word, one might say spontaneity; and if this term were to be "defined", one might mention the phrase wei wu wei, "action/non-action".

The universe comes into being spontaneously; as Kuo Hsiang points out, the search for a "lord" (or agens) of this creation is an exercise in infinite regress toward emptiness. The Tao is not "God", as some Christian translators still believe. The Tao just happens. On the human scale misery arises solely from the uniquely human ability to fall out of harmony with this Tao - to not be spontaneous.

Chuang Tzu has no interest in why humans are so inept (no concept of "sin"); his only concern is to reverse the process and "return" to the flow. The "return" is an action; the flow itself is not an action but a state - hence the paradox "action/non-action". The concept wu wei plays such a central role in Taoism that it survives even in modern religious Taoism as the truth BEHIND all metaphysics and ritual. In the great expiatory and communal rites of cultic Taoism as practiced in Taiwan or Honolulu today, at least one person - the priest - must attain union with the Tao, and must do so by a process of voiding his consciousness of all "deities", all metaphysical principles. As for so-called ancient "philosophical" Taoism, we might say that it has wu wei instead of a metaphysics.

Lao Tzu's goal seems to have been the conversion of the Emperor to Taoism, on the assumption that if the rule does nothing (wu wei) the empire will run itself spontaneously. Chuang Tzu however shows almost no interest in advising rulers (except to leave him alone!), and his examples of "real humans" are almost always workmen (butchers, cobblers, cooks), or drop-out hermits, or bandits. If Chuang Tzu can be said to advocate a social program - and I'm not sure he does - it certainly has nothing to do with any imperial/bureaucratic/Confucian values or structures. His "program" could be summed up in the phrase AIMLESS WANDERING.

Chuang Tzu is more anarchistic than Lao Tzu - but is he an "anarchist"? I think yes - not because he wants to overthrow the government, but because he believes government impossible; not because he would ever sink so low as to espouse an "ism", but because he sees chaos as the essence of all becoming.

To illustrate this chaos-ontology we could do worse than investigate Chuang Tzu's take on language.

But first let me define a few terms. I call hermetalinguistics the concept that God revealed language and that there exists such a thing as the conveyance of essence through language. This conveyance can be direct (Hebrew and Arabic are languages "spoken" by God) or emanational, as in Neoplatonic linguistics. It can be "hermetic" (or occult, as in Kabbala), or even meta-linguistic (as in religious glossolalia, the "charism of tongues") - but in either case it saves language from utter relativity and opacity.

Against this traditional theory of language we moderns have developed a nihilistic linguistics in which words convey nothing of essence and in fact do not really communicate anything except language itself. I trace this current to Nietzsche, to Saussure and his nightmarish experience with the Latin anagrams, and eventually to dada.

A leading exponent of hermetalinguistics today (oddly enough) is Noam Chomsky, who (despite his anarchism) believes that language is somehow wired in, although he substitutes DNA for the Platonic archetypes! Whom might we pick as a leading exponent of nihilistic linguistics? How about William Burroughs? (In his honour we might call it "heavymetalinguistics".) Much as I admire the aesthetics of both schools I can "agree" with neither. I find myself wishing (as a "spiritual anarchist") for some language theory which might "save" language from the charge of mere re-presentationalism and alienation. However, I want a theory without teleological excrescences - no "lord" of language, no categorical imperatives, no determinism, no revelation from "outside" or "above", no genetic coding, no absolute essence. I find it in two places, one "ancient" nicely balanced against one "modern" - Chuang Tzu, and Chaos Theory.

In part our language troubles arise from the absolute quality assigned to the Word in all western hermetalinguistic traditions. Although some western mystics already express distrust of human words, they can never - on pain of heterodoxy - question the integrity or finality of God's Word. All western religious thought is based on a sort of sacred nominalism which goes unquestioned till "heresy" calls it momentarily into debate. "Orthodoxy" crushes the rebellion against the Word in its own ranks, while the war against the Word becomes an underground guerilla campaign carried out primarily within literature, in criticism, and in linguistics - against "religion".

We might learn something useful for our search by looking at a spiritual tradition with begins with a distrust of words and yet still manages to make language perform in a magical way. Taoism supplies us with precisely such a radical tradition. "The Tao which can be spoken is not the Tao," begins Lao Tzu. Why then did he write the book at all? Why not stick to the silence where all language eventually vanishes, right from the start? One might answer that such a project would amount to precisely the sort of refusal to go with the flow which Taoism most despises. Humans talk, so Taoists talk. This answer might suffice - but a much more interesting response is given by Chuang Tzu.

"Saying is not blowing breath, saying says something," Chuang Tzu asserts - but "the only trouble is that what it says is never fixed. Do we really say something? Or have we never said anything?" Finally this question must remain unanswered, since Chuang Tzu's uncompromising perspectivalism and linguistic relativism make any categorical attempt to distinguish between "It" and "Other" an act of futility. As the translator (A.C. Graham) points out, for Chuang Tzu "all disputation starts from arbitrary acts of naming". Nevertheless, "saying says something" rather than nothing. Language is at once totally "arbitrary" and yet capable of meaning. Otherwise the Taoist would indeed fall silent.

A writer of the School of Chuang Tzu discusses what he calls "ward and sector words", by which he means the sorting and classifying functions of language. (The metaphor refers to the wards and sectors of the grid-arrangement of Chinese cities; it's worth noting that the very earliest cities, such as Jericho and Catal Huyuk, were laid out on strict grid-lines.) This aspect of language is not "the Way", and at worst can become a "chopping to bits and disputing over alternatives". But it is also not not-the-Way. Some paradoxical stance between saying and not-saying is called for, because "the man who perceives the Way does not pursue [names] to where they vanish or explore the source from which they arise," for "this is the point where discussion stops." "There IS a name," but also "there is NO name."

Chuang Tzu distinguishes three kinds of speech. An appended commentary by one of the original editors of the book asserts that all three kinds are used by Chuang Tzu himself.

First there is saying from a lodging-place. Inasmuch as language is arbitrary one may occupy any position or use any definitions to expound the Way. The old editor says Chuang Tzu thought this kind of verbal situationism broadened the scope or "widened the range", i.e. that it could be used to open up ordinary mind to the non-ordinary and meta-verbal Tao. In fact, it works "nine times out of ten," says Chuang Tzu. "Weighted saying works seven times out of ten" - this is the aphorism, the statement made on authority, spoken from a position "ahead of others". Both lodging-place and weighted language would appear to belong to the category of ward-and-sector words. Chuang Tzu's third category clearly interests him the most, since he describes it at the greatest length. He calls it Spillover saying, and comments that it "is new everyday. Smooth it out on the whetstone of Heaven. Use it to go by and let the stream find its own channels."

Since language is arbitrary, and the sage knows it, he (or she - for many Taoists were women, including Lao Tzu's legendary teacher) knows that "in saying he says nothing". And yet paradoxically by knowing this and in fact by "refusing to say", the sage "says without saying" and "refuses to say without ever failing to say". How can this be?

When Chuang Tzu says that "the myriad things [i.e., the signifieds] are all the seed from which they grow," I assume that "they" refers to words, to signs, and that he does assert some link between the two categories, despite his (paradoxical) counter-assertion that no such connection can be found. The connection cannot be found (expressed in words) because in unlike shapes they abdicate in turn, with ends and starts as in a ring.

That is, "things" themselves are ontologically fluid and protean, unfixed. If you mark a wheel and then spin it, none grasps where to mark the grades, and all becomes a blur. As for this flux-state of sign and signified, call it the Potter's Wheel of Heaven or "the whetstone of Heaven" on which the sage is advised to "smooth out" or polish his speech. Without this understanding, "who could ever keep going for long?" What decent Taoist could ever speak at all, much less meaningfully? But because language, by this understanding, becomes "new every day", the sage is finally not stunned or stultified by the arbitrariness and relativity of language, by its failure, but is refreshed and revivified by its freedom.

The most important clue to understanding this teaching about language is in the image "Spillover". Graham says it refers to a vessel which tips over when filled to the brim, then rights itself, like one of those little oriental dolls which are legless and weighted at the bottom, so that they always pop back up when you try to knock them over. These dolls by the way are shaped like gourds and were probably originally made from gourds. The gourd is a symbol of Chaos, "Mr. Hun-T'un", described in the famous final passage of the Inner Chapters. Could the original "Spillover" vessel also have been a gourd, and thus associated in Chuang Tzu's mind with Chaos? In Chinese myth Chaos is not a figure of Evil (as in most western mythology), but is instead full of potential, benevolent if somewhat eerie, the ultimate force and source of all creation. From Chaos comes the "myriad things", like the seeds in a gourd or the chopped-up goodies in a won-ton (hung-t'un), or the water in a spillover-vessel which flows out, letting each stream find its own channel, fertilizing the earth, bringing everything into becoming.

The vessel could refer to the Sage, who spontaneously "overflows" with illumined words. The words find their meanings (channels) spontaneously, according to the language-state of the listener, the reader. And then spontaneously the Sage pops upright and is filled again, and each day overflows again. A chaotic process - but one from which meaning comes into being. Moreover, one can become practiced at this conjuring act, polished, "smooth".

The vessel could refer not only to the sage but even more to the words themselves. A word, which in itself is arbitrary and meaningless, spontaneously fills up and overflows with meaning. The meaning is not fixed, but it is not mere "blowing breath", nor just a semantic raspberry, bllllatttt. The vessel fills up and empties again and again - same vessel, but potentially a new meaning each day. So the word contains more meaning than it appears to nominate or denominate. There is something more, something extra in the word. There are words beneath (or upon) the words, which flow out spontaneously and find their channels, their expression, their use in a given situation. "Taoist Poetics".

Thus, beginning with total linguistic relativism, Chuang Tzu ends with a sort of metalinguistics. Spillover words do not ward and sector, they PLAY. They contain more than they contain. Like the famous cleaver which never needs sharpening because the Taoist butcher can pass it between all tendons and joints, the Spillover word "finds its proper channel". The sage does not become trapped in semantics, does not mistake map for territory, but rather "opens things up to the light of Heaven" by flowing with the words, by playing with the words. Once attuned to this flow, the sage need make no special effort to "illumine", for language DOES IT by itself, spontaneously. Language spills over.

Now, recall that when Saussure was studying the Latin anagrams, he found that the key words of the poems spilled over into other words. For example, syllables of character's names were echoed in words describing those characters. At first the founder of modern linguistic considered these anagrams as conscious literary devices. However, little by little it became apparent that such a "reading" would not hold. Saussure began to find anagramatic spillovers everywhere he looked - not only in ALL Latin poetry, but even in prose. He reached the point where he couldn't tell if he was experiencing a linguistic hallucination or a divine revelation. Anagrams everywhere! Language itself a net of jewels in which every gem reflects all others! He wrote a letter to a respected academic Latinist who had composed Latin odes - poems in which Saussure had detected anagrams. Tell me, he begged, are you the heir to a secret tradition handed down from Classical antiquity - or are you doing it unconsciously? Needless to say, Saussure received no answer. He stopped his research abruptly with a sensation of vertigo, trembling at the abyss of pure nihilism, or pure magic, terrified by the implications of a language beyond language, beyond sign/content, langue/parole. He stopped, in short, precisely where Chuang Tzu begins.

Words are like wind and water.
-Chuang Tzu

The invisible/conceptual gourd which activates or circulates spillover language can also be compared with the strange attractor of modern chaos theory. The strange attractor is a real but non-material patterning that exists only in the action it informs. Think for example of a swirl of smoke in the air. Why doesn't the smoke simply dissipate evenly, like a mathematical gas? Why are there patterns in it? Strange attractors are "attracting" the particles of smoke into those vegetal undulations, just as planets are attracted into orbits, or cells are attracted into a lizard's ass to replace a cut-off tail. Strange attractors activate "order out of chaos" (in Ilya Prigogine's phrase). Attractors animate "random" matter into coherent shapes - but in reality the attractor only "exists" IN the material process itself. The attractor can serve not only as a model for morphogenesis but even for evolution itself. Prigogine's "creative evolution" depends neither on the blind "random mutations" of the neo-Darwinians, nor on the entelechy or vitalism of the Creationists. With chaos theory, the "Third Mind" has entered into the equation, Michel Serres' "parasite". One might coin the term "Taoist dialectics" to describe the action of this tertium quid, which bears so uncanny a resemblance to the Strange Attractor, the "catastrophe machine". In the yin-yang disc the lozenge of dark contains a seed of light, and vice versa; moreover the areas are not separated by the straight line of Dualism, but rather by the snaky, sinuous, and ambiguous line of dyadic movement. Western dialectics analyzes in order to synthesize, whereas Taoist dialectics begins with synthesis in order to analyze.

If words can be compared to matter (and why not, give their equally dubious ontological status?!) and "grammar" can be compared to the Strange Attractors (patterns which are "real" but only "come into existence" in the presence of words and are only "real" IN the words), then we may also compare Chuang Tzu's Spillover Linguistics with the chaos theory of such mages as Prigogine and Ralph Abraham, and launch the science (or pseudo-science) of chaos linguistics. This useful fiction will be born under the sign of what Feyerabend calls "anarchist (or dada) epistemology" - a kind of anti-Method already dreamed by Chuang Tzu.

In religious Taoism the deity of automatic or "spirit"-writing, Tzu-Ku-Shen, is also the goddess of the latrine - thus calling up the image of magical language as a kind of caca-phony or defecatory chaos which somehow manages to convey meaning (reminiscent of the paradox known to Information Theory in which "noise" can be "richer" in "information" than certain ordered codes). In time Tzu Ku came to preside over a panoply of Immortals who wielded the magic inkbrush or "flying phoenix" through human mediums. Usually women, as in western spiritualism, these mediums act as amanuensis to the spooks, and have transmitted everything from garbage to canonical scripture. (Mao Shan Taoism was founded in this way, by two mediums channeling a dead woman sage under the influence of hemp incense.) An eleventh-century author named Shen Ku describes the process under the evocative title "Dream Torrent Essays" - a sweeping away of daylight consciousness in a wave of hypnogogia.

A great deal of Taoist scripture, both Canonical and heterodox, has been produced in this way. Some of it is "found", like the tantric Tibetan "treasure"-texts (terma), encased in solid rock or living wood, or under water, or in other impossible places. An entire order of Tibetan treasure-finders devotes itself to the lore and discovery of such texts. Some Taoist texts are not composed in human language or writing, but in the "tadpole" or "cloud" script of the spirits. An immense amount of language has spilled over from the Cinnabar Grottos of the Immortals into our world. While vulgar materialists may content themselves with scoffing at the provenance of this huge indigestible heap of writing, we might prefer simply to marvel at the overwhelming superabundance and generosity of reality itself, a plenitude which seems to conspire with us in all our maddest japes. As Nietzsche and Bataille have suggested, the myth of scarcity is merely a means of control through immiseration, whereas the actual nature of the world is one of absolute fullness, indeed over-fullness, spilling over as constant EXCESS. In language, this over-supply of meaning proves too big to be handled by human consciousness; hence the intervention of the spirits, the "muses" and other extra-conscious sources. Taoist writing serves as a monument to the "generosity of being" or the perpetual overflow of the cornucopias Tao. At its most chaotic and ambiguous peak of expression, it "saves" language itself - both from the tyranny of any lord, and from the abyss of aloneness.

by Hakim Bey

posted in Aimless Wandering - 3 replies

Playing With the Clouds

2006-04-22T22:29:18Z

The Emotions And Dreaming

One of the great insights of ancient practitioners was the fact that, if a daily regimen of energy practices is maintained-specially refining the emotions-the quality and quantity of dreams changes. If a person goes to bed after having cleared the vital organs from unresolved emotions the amount of emotional dreams and nightmares dramatically decreases, sometimes to the point that they disappear completely. This does not mean that the person ceases to have dreams, but rather that the quality of the dream shifts from restless to harmonious and pleasant.

One of the greatest insights gained exploring the connection between dreams and energy practices was that dreams are experiences taking place at the level of the subtle bodies. In other words, as a person begins to fall asleep and the senses gradually disconnect from the physical world, they turn inward. A process akin to having a good meditation. As the senses turn inward, the consciousness which was focused on the physical world through the senses also turns inward-in the direction of the subtle energy body.

The Taoists consider falling asleep as a process no different from entering into a meditative state. Just as in deep states of meditation if the body is fatigued the practitioner may fall asleep and go unconscious, so going to sleep has to take place, paradoxically, when one is not fatigued. For the Taoists falling asleep is an open door for playing fully conscious with the subtle energy body and carrying out energy practices without the limitations of the physical body.

Every time we let go into sleep our consciousness shifts its focus from the physical dense body to the subtle energy body at the other end of the spectrum. If we speak of sleep then it is of the physical body, since the subtle aspects never falls asleep. The subtle energy aspect operates 24 hours through our lives. We may not be consciously aware when we shift our conscious focus to the subtle body, however we all do that many times during our waking hours. For example we all had the experience when we were children in school of sitting bored through an uninteresting class. Then as the teacher continued talking we gradually began to go with our minds somewhere else. We began to dream with the eyes open about doing something far more enjoyable at that moment. Our conscious focus was far away from the classroom and the teacher. If this day dreaming went on for a long time, and all of a sudden the teacher asked us a question, we had to forcefully bring back our mental focus to the teacher, with predictable inability to answer the question properly. Ordinarily we say we were fantasizing at that moment, doing something which was not real in a physical sense. The Taoist would not call it fantasizing but rather shifting attention from the physical to the subtle, just as when we are dreaming in bed.

Dreaming is not an action which is confined to falling asleep. We dream 24 hours a day. A part of our consciousness which is not fully engaged in the physical plane dealing with day to day problems is focused on the subtle aspects of the body. Many times a day we shift conscious focus from physical reality to subtle reality. Our awareness at that moment may be focused on a friend that is at the other side of the planet. Sometimes if our focusing is intense enough something unexpected may happen: the phone rings! It is our friend calling from the other side of the planet to tell us they were thinking of us just at that moment. Has this happened to you? Ordinarily we call these happenings `coincidence'. A word for labeling the unexplainable. For the Taoists familiar with the full spectrum of the life force this is not something unexplainable. When we shift our mental focus onto someone far away at that instant we are in direct contact with the subtle body of that person. The geographical distance is irrelevant.

One of the insights which opens as one begins to consciously shift mental focus from the physical to the subtle is that the life force is not limited by physical reality. It could not be because the physical is just one aspect of the energy spectrum. There is the rest of the spectrum operating simultaneously beyond the physical. So energy is not limited by space, nor time which is also a function of space.

Every time we place the head on the pillow and fall asleep our consciousness focuses its gaze upon a dimension which is not limited by time or space. A dimension which is extremely fluid and efficient because it is not limited by time or the constraints of distance. In dream we have all experienced how in the fraction of an instant we can change from walking to flying across the landscape or being here and then on the other side of the moon.

The practices developed by the ancient Taoists around dream state were designed to tap into the inexhaustible reservoir of possibilities that transcending time and space offers. One essential notion they got rid of was the ordinary belief that dreams are fantasies with no basis on reality. A dream may not have any basis on physical reality, but then physical existence is not the only realm of experience there is. What we ordinarily call reality is limited to physical experience and is just a fragment of the totality of being. Dreams, intuitions, feelings we dismiss into the dust bin of the not-real. The Taoists would call that a fragmented vision.

More...
http://nothingness23.blogspot.com/2006/04/playing-with-clouds.html

posted in Aimless Wandering - 1 reply

chuangtzufly

2006-04-11T02:22:09Z

http://nothingness23.blogspot.com/2006/04/chuangtzufly.html

posted in Aimless Wandering - 0 replies

Check out Anarchism-Tantric Buddhism-Chaos Magick

2006-04-06T07:49:59Z

For further discussion's on some parallel lines of thought check out:
http://tribes.tribe.net/anarchodorje111

posted in Aimless Wandering - 1 reply

Taoism & Anarchism

2006-03-26T01:23:35Z

ANARCHISM IS USUALLY CONSIDERED a recent, Western phenomenon, but its roots reach deep in the ancient civilizations of the East. The first clear expression of an anarchist sensibility may be traced back to the Taoists in ancient China from about the sixth century BC. Indeed, the principal Taoist work, the Tao te ching, may be considered one of the greatest anarchist classics.

The Taoists at the time were living in a feudal society in which law was becoming codified and government increasingly centralized and bureaucratic. Confucius was the chief spokesman of the legalistic school supporting these developments, and called for a social hierarchy in which every citizen knew his place. The Taoists for their part rejected government and believed that all could live in natural and spontaneous harmony. The conflict between those who wish to interfere and those who believe that things flourish best when left alone has continued ever since.

The Taoists and the Confucians were both embedded in ancient Chinese culture. They shared a similar view of nature, but differed strongly in their moral and political views. They both had an attitude of respectful trust to human nature; the Christian notion of original sin is entirely absent from their thought. Both believed that human beings have an innate predisposition to goodness which is revealed in the instinctive reaction of anyone who sees a child falling into a well. Both claimed to defend the Tao or the way of the ancients and sought to establish voluntary order.

But whereas the Taoists were principally interested in nature and identified with it, the Confucians were more worldly- minded and concerned with reforming society. The Confucians celebrated traditionally 'male' virtues like duty, discipline and obedience, while the Taoists promoted the 'female' values of receptivity and passivity.

Although it has helped shape Chinese culture as much as Buddhism and Confucianism, Taoism by its very nature never became an official cult. It has remained a permanent strain in Chinese thought. Its roots lay in the popular culture at the dawn of Chinese civilization but it emerged in the sixth century BC as a remarkable combination of philosophy, religion, proto-science and magic.

The principal exponent of Taoism is taken to be Lao Tzu, meaning 'old Philosopher'. He was born around 604 BC of a noble family in Honan province. He rejected his hereditary positron as a noble and became a curator of the royal library at Loh. All his life he followed the path of silence- 'The Tao that can be told is not the eternal Tao', he taught. According to legend, when he was riding off into the desert to die, he was persuaded by a gatekeeper in north-western China to write down his teaching for posterity.

It seems likely however that the Tao te ching which is attributed to Lao Tzu, was not written until the third century BC. It has been called by the Chinese scholar Joseph Needham 'without exception the most profound and beautiful work in the Chinese language'.3 The text consists of eighty-one short chapters in poetic form. Although often very obscure and paradoxical, it offers not only the earliest but also the most eloquent exposition of anarchist principles.

It is impossible to appreciate the ethics and politics of Taoism without an understanding of its philosophy of nature. The Tao te ching celebrates the Tao, or way, of nature and describes how the wise person should follow it. The Taoist conception of nature is based on the ancient Chinese principles of yin and yang, two opposite but complementary forces in the cosmos which constitute ch'i (matter-energy) of which all beings and phenomena are formed. Yin is the supreme feminine power, characterized by darkness, cold, and receptivity and associated with the moon; yang is the masculine counterpart of brightness, warmth, and activity, and is identified with the sun. Both forces are at work within men and women as well as in all things.

The Tao itself however cannot be defined. it is nameless and formless. Lao Tzu, trying vainly to describe what is ineffable, likens it to an empty vessel, a river flowing home to the sea, and an uncarved block. 'The Tao, he asserts, follows what is natural. It is the way in which the universe works, the order of nature which gives all things their being and sustains them.

The great Tao flows everywhere, both to the left and the right. The ten thousand things depend on it; it holds nothing back. It fulfils its purpose silently and makes no claim. (34)

Needham describes it not so much as a force, but as a 'kind of natural curvature in time and space'.4

Like most later anarchists, the Taoists see the universe as being in a continuous state of flux. Reality is in a state of process; everything changes, nothing is constant. They also have a dialectical concept of change as a dynamic interplay as opposing forces. Energy flows continually between the poles of yin end yang. At the same time, they stress the unity and harmony of nature. Nature is self-sufficient and uncreated; there is no need to postulate a conscious creator. It is a view which not only recalls that of the Greek philosopher Heraclitus but coincides with the description of the universe presented by modern physics. Modern social ecology, which stresses unity in diversity, organic growth and natural order, further reflects the Taoist world-view.

The approach to nature recommended by Lao Tzu and the Taoists is one of receptivity. Where the Confucian wants to conquer and exploit nature, the Taoist tries to contemplate and understand it. The Taoists' traditionally 'feminine' approach to nature suggests that their way of thinking may well have first evolved in a matriarchal society. While at first sight it might seem a religious attitude, in fact it encouraged a scientific and democratic outlook amongst Taoists. By not imposing their own preconceptions, they were able to observe and understand nature and therefore learn to channel its energy beneficially.

The Taoists were primarily interested in nature but their conception of the universe had important corollaries for society. A definite system of ethics and politics emerges. There are no absolute Taoist values; for good and bad, like yin and yang, are related. Their interplay is necessary for growth, and in order to achieve something it is often best to start with its opposite. Nevertheless, an ideal of the wise person emerges in Taoist teaching who is unpretentious, sincere, spontaneous, generous and detached. For the Taoists, the art of living is to be found in simplicity, non-assertion and creative play.

Central to Taoist teaching is the concept of wu-wei. It is often translated as merely non-action. In fact there are striking philological similarities between 'anarchism' and 'wu-wei'. Just as 'an-archos' in Greek means absence of a ruler, wu-wei means lack of wei, where wei refers to 'artificial, contrived activity that interferes with natural and spontaneous development'.5 From a political point of view, wei refers to the imposition of authority. To do something in accordance with wu-wei is therefore considered natural; it leads to natural and spontaneous order. It has nothing to do with all forms of imposed authority.

The Tao te ching is quite clear about the nature of force. If we use force, whether physical or moral, to improve ourselves or the world, we simply waste energy and weaken ourselves: 'force is followed by loss of strength' (30). It follows that those who wage war will suffer as a result: 'a violent man will die a violent death' (42). By contrast, giving way is often the best way to overcome: 'Under heaven nothing is more soft and yielding than water Yet for attacking the solid and strong, nothing is better; it has no equal. The weak can overcome the strong; the supple can overcome the stiff.' (78) The gentle peacefulness recommended by the Taoists is not a form of defeatist submission but a call for the creative and effective use of energy.

'Practise non-action. Work without doing' (63), Lao Tzu recommends. In their concept of wu-wei, the Taoists are not urging non-action in the sense of inertia, but rather condemning activity contrary to nature. It is not idleness that they praise, but work without effort, anxiety and complicati on, work which goes with and not against the grain of things. If people practised wu-wei in the right spirit, work would lose its coercive aspect. It would be undertaken not for its useful results but for its intrinsic value. Instead of being avoided like the plague, work would be transformed into spontaneous and meaningful play: 'When actions are performed Without unnecessary speech, People say, "We did it!"' (l7).

If people followed their advice, the Taoists suggest, they would live a long life and achieve physical and mental health. one of their fundamental beliefs was that 'whatever is contrary to Tao will not last long' (55), while he who is filled with virtue is like a new-born child. In order to prolong their lives the Taoists resorted to yoga-like techniques and even alchemy.

The most important principle at the centre of their teaching however was a belief that 'The world is ruled by letting things take their course. It cannot be ruled by interfering.'(48) The deepest roots of the Taoist view of wu-wei probably lies in early matriarchal society in ancient China. The Taoist ideal was a form of agrarian collectivism which sought to recapture the instinctive unity with nature which human beings had lost in developing an artificial and hierarchical culture. Peasants are naturally wise in many ways. By hard experience, they refrain from activity contrary to nature and realize that in order to grow plants they must understand and co-operate with the natural processes. And just as plants grow best when allowed to follow their natures, so human beings thrive when least interfered with.6 It was this insight which led the Taoists to reject all forms of imposed authority, government and the State. It also made them into precursors of modern anarchism and social ecology.

It has been argued that Taoism does not reject the State as an artificial structure, but rather sees it as a natural institution,, analogous perhaps to the family.7 While the Tao te ching undoubtedly rejects authoritarian rule, it does read at times as if it is giving advice to rulers to become better at ruling:

If the sage would guide the people, he must serve with humility.
If he would lead them, he must follow behind.
In this way when the sage rules, the people will not feel oppressed (66)

Bookchin goes so far as to claim that Taoism was used by an elite to foster passivity amongst the peasantry by denying them choice and hope.8

Certainly Lao Tzu addresses the problem of leadership and calls for the true sage to act with the people and not above them. The best ruler leaves his people alone to follow their peaceful and productive activities. He must trust their good faith for 'He who does not trust enough will not be trusted.' (l 7) If a ruler interferes with his people rather than letting them follow their own devices, then disorder will follow: 'When the country is confused and in chaos, Loyal ministers appear.' (l 8) In a well-ordered society,

Man follows the earth.
Earth follows heaven.
Heaven follows the Tao.
Tao follows what is natural.(25)

However a closer reading shows that the Tao te ching is not concerned with offering Machiavellian advice to rulers or even with the 'art of governing'. The person who genuinely understands the Tao and applies it to government reaches the inevitable conclusion that the best government does not govern at all.9 Lao Tzu sees nothing but evil coming from government. Indeed, he offers what might be described as the first anarchist manifesto:

The more laws and restrictions there are,
The poorer people become.
The sharper men's weapons,
The more trouble in the land.
The more ingenious and clever men are,
The more strange things happen.
The more rules and regulations,
The more thieves and robbers.

Therefore the sage says:
I take no action and people are reformed.
I enjoy peace and people become honest.
I do nothing and the people become rich.
I have no desires and people return to the good and
simple life.(57)

Contained within the marvellous poetry of the Tao te ching, there is some very real social criticism. It is sharply critical of the bureaucratic, warlike and commercial nature of the feudal order. Lao Tzu specifically sees property as a form of robber: 'When the court is arrayed in splendour, The fields are full of weeds, And the granaries are bare.'(53) He traces the causes of war to unequal distribution: 'Claim wealth and titles, and disaster will follow '(9) Having attacked feudalism with its classes and private property, he offers the social ideal of a classless society without government and patriarchy in which people live simple and sincere lives in harmony with nature. It would be a decentralized society in which goods are produced and shared in common with the help of appropriate technology. The people would be strong but with no need to show their strength; wise, but with no presence of learning; productive, but engaged in no unnecessary toil. They would even prefer to reckon by knotting rope rather than by writing ledgers:

A small country has fewer people.
Though there are machines that can work ten to a hundred
times faster than man, they are not needed.
The people take death seriously and do not travel far.
Though they have boats and carriages, no one uses them.
Though they have armour and weapons, no one displays them.
Men return to the knotting of rope in place of writing.
Their food is plain and good, their clothes fine but simple, their homes secure;
They are happy in their ways.
Though they live within sight of their neighbours,
And crowing cocks and barking dogs are heard across the way,
Yet they leave each other in peace while they grow old and die.(80)

The anarchistic tendency of the Taoists comes through even stronger in the writings of the philosopher Chuang Tzu, who lived about 369-286 BC. His work consists of arguments interspersed with anecdotes and parables which explore the nature of the Tao, the great organic process of which man is a part. It is not addressed to any particular ruler. Like the Tao te ching, it rejects all forms of government and celebrates the free existence of the self-determining individual. The overriding tone of the work is to be found in a little parable about horses:

Horses live on dry land, eat grass and drink water. When pleased, they rub their necks together. When angry, they turn round and kick up their heels at each other. Thus far only do their natural dispositions carry them. But bridled and bitted, with a plate of metal on their foreheads, they learn to cast vicious looks, to turn the head to bite, to resist, to get the bit out of the mouth or the bridle into it. And thus their natures become depraved.1O

As with horses, so it is with human beings. Left to themselves they live in natural harmony and spontaneous order. But when they are coerced and ruled, their natures become vicious. It follows that princes and rulers should not coerce their people into obeying artificial laws, but should leave them to follow their natural dispositions. To attempt to govern people with manmade laws and regulations is absurd and impossible: 'as well try to wade through the sea, to hew a passage through a river, or make a mosquito fly away with a mountain!'. 11 In reality, the natural conditions of our existence require no artificial aids. People left to themselves will follow peaceful and productive activities and live in harmony with each other and nature.

In an essay 'On Letting Alone', Chuang Tzu asserted three hundred years before Christ the fundamental proposition of anarchist thought which has reverberated through history ever since:

'There has been such a thing as letting mankind alone; there has never been such a thing as governing mankind. Letting alone springs from fear lest men's natural dispositions be perverted and their virtue left aside. But if their natural dispositions be not perverted nor their virtue laid aside, what room is there left for government?12

'The Taoists therefore advocated a free society. without government in which individuals would be left to themselves. But while pursuing their own interests, they would not forget the interests of others. It is not a sullen selfishness which is recommended. The pursuit of personal good involves a concern for the general well-being: the more a person does for others, the more he has; the more he gives to others, the greater his abundance. As the Taoist text Huai Nan Tzu put its, 'Possessing the empire' means 'self-realization. If I realize myself then the empire also realizes me. If the empire and I realize each other, then we will always possess each other.'13

Human beings are ultimately individuals but they are also social beings, part of the whole. Anticipating the findings of modern ecology, the 'Taoists believed that the more individuality and diversity there is, the greater the overall harmony. The spontaneous order of society does not exclude conflict hut involves a dynamic interplay of opposite forces. Thus society is described by Chuang Tzu as

an agreement of a certain number of families and individuals to abide by certain customs. Discordant elements unite to form a harmonious whole. Take away this unity and each has a separate individuality . . . .A mountain is high because of its individual particles. A river is large because of its individual drops. And he is a just man who regards all parts from the point of view of the whole.14

Taoism thus offered the first and one of the most persuasive expressions of anarchist thinking. Its moral and political ideas were firmly grounded in a scientific view of the world. Although Taoist philosophy (Tao chia) contains Spiritual and mystical elements, the early Taoists' receptive approach to nature encouraged a scientific attitude and democratic feelings. They recognized the unity in the diversity in nature and the universality of transformation. In their ethics, they encouraged spontaneous behaviour and self-development in the larger context of nature: production with possession, action without self-assertion and development without domination. In their politics, they not only urged rulers to leave their subjects alone and opposed the bureaucratic and legalistic teaching of the Confucians, but advocated as an ideal a free and co-operative society without government in harmony with nature.

Taoism was not aimed by an elite at peasants to make them more docile and obedient. The Taoists social background tended to be from the small middle class, between the feudal lords and the mass of peasant farmers. Nor were they merely offering advice on how to survive in troubled times by yielding to the strong, keeping a low profile, and by minding their own business. on the contrary, Taoism was the philosophy of those who had understood the real nature of temporal power, wealth and status, sufficiently well to find them radically wanting. Far from being a philosophy of failure or quietude, Taoism offers profound and practical wisdom for those who wish to develop the full harmony of their being.

posted in Aimless Wandering - 1 reply

Aspects of Chaosophy

2006-03-24T02:43:19Z

by Frater Harpo Ben Ishmael Bey

(notes) The man in motley as the archetype: the divine fool, green man- in real life, the Sufi mystic, poet-philosopher, whose tales function on many levels... the artist as initiate-by-intuition. Shaman and Sufi are the root-forms... the "black" in black arts did not originally refer to any association with any prince of darkness, but to the whole complex of spiritual and magical traditions with roots in ancient Africa and Egypt... necessity of secrecy limits groups to small gatherings, inspires in-group signs, code-words, hand- shakes, intimate communion of shared mindspace largely absent from majority culture... a vigilant attention, awareness of true presence in the present, etc... to choose consciousness over consensus is always regarded with suspicion by the majority - the very definition of madness in totalitarian states... and yet, by some sort of Lemarckian evolution, the conspiratorial heart of active imagining has been hard-wired into "mind," a major tool of consciousness, never "meant" to be used once or twice and discarded, its value is as continuous aid to navigation through the chaosea of possibility. The prophet as shining beacon is the symbol of the collective's amplification and projection of its members inner lights... or should be. To each his or her own taproot to the underground source... we all contain the chaosufic circuit, only most of us are too damaged, dazzled and brutalized by the demands of post-modern life and all of our mechanical and electronic masters to ever really hear the song of our own being, let alone sing it, let alone to hear and harmonize with the essential songs of our fellow creatures. The true poets of our time are virtually unknown and largely unheeded, but are nevertheless of the greatest importance. Their invisible influence embraces the whole world.

posted in Aimless Wandering - 0 replies

THE DOCTRINE OF CONCEALMENT (TAQIYYA)

2006-03-24T02:31:53Z

or
WHY PAGANS DON'T HAVE TO COME OUT,
JUST YET

by Shakudion

In this essay I will discuss the problems neo-pagans face in our
"Christian-based society" about being public with their faith and in
the creation of a free space wherein one is safe to practice their
faith. In doing so, I will use the principle of comparative religion
and show what modern pagans can learn from the experience of
Ismailism. Ismailism, considered by the dominant Sunni Muslims as an
Islamic heresy, was in a similar position concerning their society.
However, Ismailism found a way to survive and for a while to prosper
(until it's center was destroyed by the Mongols) , a story from which
we post-modern pagans can learn.

The Ismaili's used the doctrine of taqiyya, concealment, as a means of
survival in a hostile religious environment. Passive martyrdom is rare
in Islam; if one is attacked then one should defend oneself and strike
back if possible. However, senseless dying doesn't do anyone any good.
Taqiyya allows one to take on the outward appearance of orthodoxy
while remaining faithful to one's true beliefs. This meant taking on
the chains of the Law (shariah) through performing orthodox religious
acts. To Islamic orthodoxy this was usually enough as it was your
actions and not mere belief which made one a Moslem. And while taking
on the outward appearance of orthodoxy, Ismaili missionaries spread
their doctrines throughout the Islamic world. And when they could
safely come out of concealment they did as when they founded the
Fatimid Imamate in Eygpt during the 10th century.

Modern pagans can also choose to conceal their true faith, if to come
out would cause senseless martyrdom (loss of family, job, life, etc.).
Remember, the gods and goddesses call you to life and not to
self-destruction. So if you cannot come out safely, then don't! And
you should not feel guilty about it either. If you can come out safely
do so, but do not look down upon or feel you are more pagan than those
who cannot come out safely.

Concealment is not personal oppression; it does not mean you are not
free. The pagan closet is the first free space one creates. Within it
neither church nor state has any real power. These powers have no way
of knowing your existence much less of oppressing you (unless you let
them). The very act of concealment shows that you have more power than
they do over your own life. Your secret practice of paganism makes a
mockery of all means of power and control.

This leads us to another point of Ismailism: the expansion of free
space through evangelicalism (paganism is also good news!). The
freedom of an individual is always a fragile freedom easily crushed if
exposed. By linking up with others one can use the strength of
solidarity to defend each other against the powers. Ismaili
missionaries would travel the Islamic world looking for those who were
capable of experiencing gnosis (enlightenment) linking them up into a
world-wide free space. And wherever they became significantly
numerous, they would rise in socio-religious rebellion and come out
openly (abandoning Islamic religious practice).

One of the most inspiring religious event in history was the Feast of
the Great Resurrection. The Ismaili's had established a mini-state
centered around the fortress of Alamut in northern Iran about 1074 AD.
This fortress served as a free space for Ismailism and was a center of
learning and science. Within its bounds Islamic law was not obeyed.
This went on for about three generations till Hasan II came to be
religious leader of the community. Then on the 17th of Ramadon (the
month of fasting) Imam Hasan II called the community together from its
dispersion and at mid-day broke the fast with the drinking of wine
(forbidden in Islam on earth, but allowed in heaven). He proclaimed
the Great Resurrection and ended the concealment. "The Chains of the
Law had been Broken." By doing so he extended the free space to the
whole community thereby universalizing the enlightenment experience.
By the drinking of wine and the breaking of the fast, he declared this
world is already Paradise once one awakens to it in gnosis. The
ressurection of the dead was in fact a religious awakening to unity
with the One through the Imam. To awaken is to cast off the religious
law in trust and act in freedom.

Of course, this freedom did not last and within a few years Hasan II
was murdered and after a few generations Alamut was destroyed by the
Mongol armies of the Khan. But the story is still inspiring in how the
Ismaili's adapted themselves to a hostile environment and pagans can
learn much from its history. What is important immediately is to
create and to expand our personal freedom through the creation of free
spaces (which may be temporary and mobile) where the authority of
church and state no longer have any hold. The basis of this freedom is
the individual who has the freedom and creativity to act (either
openly or in concealment). And remember:

THE CHAINS OF THE LAW HAVE BEEN BROKEN
THIS WORLD IS ALEADY PARADISE
IT IS TIME TO WAKE UP
WHAT ARE YOU WAITING FOR?

This essay is based upon the writings of Peter Lamborn Wilson (aka
Hakim Bey) a proponent of Islamic heresy in the West. I recommentd
reading: Sacred Drift: essays on the margins of Islam; Scandal: essays
in Isalmic heresy; and T.A.Z.: the temporary autonomous zone,
ontological anarchy, & poetic terrorism

posted in Aimless Wandering - 0 replies