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  • Unknown's avatar

    hardie karges 8:41 am on July 6, 2016 Permalink | Reply
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    Ego and the Good Book: Haha, Sad, Love, Wow, and Angry, oh my! 

    like

    Like Me, Baby…

    Haven’t you heard? Life is a popularity contest or that’s what it seems like to me, measured by likes, follows, shares and the results from the latest click-bait from the latest click-mills; whoever has the most likes, follows and shares pretty much wins, when all is said and done, and all the races have been run.

    You get 1 point per like, 3 points per follow, and 5 points per share, or something like that, I’m not so sure, so I’ll have to talk to my accountant.  Whoever gets the most points by the time they die will win, of course.  What irony!  You have to die to win!  And to the victor go the spoils!

    Just kidding! So all you click-bait entrepreneurs, please note: my jaw drops for nothing and I’m not easily impressed. But wait, hold the freakin’ presses! We’ve just received the latest news from above. Facebook is now about more than just casually ‘liking’. Now there are ‘reactions’: Like, Follow, Share, plus Love, Haha, Sad, Wow, and Angry!

    That should be worth a few billion on the balance sheet. You still can’t ‘dislike’, though, of course, as that would unleash a horde of furies, but at least we can now nuance the subtleties of a certain displeasure without angering the powers that be… (More …)

     
  • Unknown's avatar

    hardie karges 6:31 am on July 3, 2016 Permalink | Reply
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    Philosophy of Mind: Thought or No-thought? 

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    Buddhist shrine in Sri Lanka

    I’ll have to admit that it bothers me somewhat the extent to which Eckhart Tolle goes to demonize the process of thought. Is this not who and what we are, for better or worse? “All thought is judgment.” Really? But he’s definitely got a point about our non-stop narratives (not to be confused with truth or reality) and the resultant mental noise and ego-defenses inherent to such a system.

    His is basically a metaphysics of meditation, if not in so many words, i.e. (mostly) without the Buddhism. And that, of course, is the challenge, in assuming that the mental state achieved in meditation can somehow be maintained every minute of every day of your life. Is that even possible? Maybe so. But I’d like to suggest a slight detour to that conclusion.

    I’ve been reading some Buddhist texts recently that allude to something that probably translates best as the ‘true original mind’ or ‘pristine mind’, as that state to be desired, sought after and accomplished, and hence to be the model for our short shrill suffering-filled existences. Okay, good enough so far, but: what does this ‘true original mind’ consist of and how does it function? That’s the issue to be determined. In other words: Did thought begin with language? (More …)

     
  • Unknown's avatar

    hardie karges 6:18 pm on June 27, 2016 Permalink | Reply
    Tags: , Brexit, , Lexit, , UK   

    Brexit Through the Gift Shop, Lexit thru the Green Lane (‘Nothing to Declare’)… 

    The Union Flag: a red cross over combined red and white saltires, all with white borders, over a dark blue background.“Bernie Sanders on Brexit: The World Economy is not Working for Everybody” (minor HuffPo headline from the day after the Brexit vote). Get it? Got it. Bernie is a ‘Leaver’, albeit for different reasons than Boris and Nigel; or at least he’s not a clear-cut ‘Remainer’, not even as much as Labor leader Jeremy Corbyn, who held his nose and shut his samosa-slot, and meekly supported the ‘Remain’ bloc, only after forty years of protesting the EU and only after his own rise to power. Damn by feint (!) praise, perhaps?

    Yes, there was also a leftist ‘Lexit’ (‘Left Leave’) vote, with the same goal as Brexit, just another reason and another season for getting there. This is the difference between Donald Trump and Bernie Sanders, and ultimately the reason I couldn’t support Bernie, even though his ideals are closer to mine than Hillary’s. (More …)

     
  • Unknown's avatar

    hardie karges 7:44 am on June 26, 2016 Permalink | Reply
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    Religion and Identity; Sex and Spirituality; Penises and Breasts… 

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    Christian church in Ethiopia

    Now I have no problem with the LGBTQ community in general and would like to think I could even qualify as the ‘A’ in ‘ally’, not ‘alley’, that sometimes puts the pickle on that little alphabetic sandwich, attached by wooden toothpick and a little smile to last a little while, even though I don’t deliberately seek gays out, though seem to usually have one or two as friends, BUT…

    …that doesn’t mean that I buy the entire narrative, especially the ‘born this way’ rap which was once de rigueur back in the days of last-line don’t-attack-the-victim defense, very quaint and old-fashioned charming now that ‘gender fluidity’ is all the rage, and there is increasingly little to be ashamed of in the first place, so no reason to claim DNA as a defense, if there is no offense, and given the lack of any proof of a ‘gay gene’ any more than a ‘basketball gene’ or even a ‘black gene’, really…

    …given that pigment genes tend to mix, somehow, much less a ‘backpacker gene’, but what concerns me is the identity with sexuality—any sexuality—in the first place. Is this all we’ve accomplished in the last ten thousand years, to come to blows (no pun) over who gets access to whose genitals, and by what means and for what purpose? I guess so. Strike one for civilization, i.e. city-fication.

    We were better off in the wild, where queer was queer, and that was that, no big deal and nothing to fear. Now we’re forced to draw the lines of decency, circling the wagons, dotting ‘I’s and crossing ‘T’s, consulting the prophets and taking a loss.  What a waste of time, and what a loss of dignity, that we’re so busy greasing the wheels (pun) of our lower chakras, that we have no time for the larger questions with the trickier answers, enigmas all wrapped up in riddles and garnished with mysteries left to lightly ferment… (More …)

     
  • Unknown's avatar

    hardie karges 7:22 am on June 21, 2016 Permalink | Reply
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    The Dark Side Dialectic of Religion, Culture and Politics… 

    isis

    ISIL wages war in the Mideast

    We cringe with horror at the antics of ISIL, but they’re very similar to those employed by the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics (USSR aka ‘Russia’) before them, that previous political entity with objectives almost exactly the opposite. The fact that the USSR crashed almost simultaneously with the rise of fundamentalist Islam is almost too coincidental to be ignored—almost.

    It’s almost like there IS indeed a dialectic of history—thesis, antithesis, synthesis—as theorized by Hegel, regardless of whether it ultimately has anything to do with the means of production, as theorized by Marx. In this scenario, something at least has to be offered up as an alternative to the dominant capitalist-consumerist system, or whatever system happens to be on top at any given time.

    In this view, therefore, there is no one specific dialectic going on at any one given time, but more of a random one—something anything. Sounds a lot like evolution, doesn’t it? Yes, it does, but more like a cultural evolution, a dialectic of ideas, as theorized by Hegel, in which we seem to be subconsciously struggling toward something else–always. Or is it a function of language itself? (More …)

     
  • Unknown's avatar

    hardie karges 9:35 am on June 12, 2016 Permalink | Reply
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    Religion 232: Eckhart Tolle, Now-ness, Spirituality, and Identity… 

    As you probably already know, thanks to the patronage of Oprah Winfrey and others, Eckhart Tolle has been called “the most spiritually influential person in the world.”  So I was all ready to diss and dismiss him as a charlatan and pop-schlock marketeer, just because he had the temerity to title his obra maestra “The Power of Now”, such now-ness easily classified as ‘cliché’ even, or especially, within high Buddhist circles, if not just by the wannabes, academics and literary hacks like myself…

    Then I decided to actually read his stuff, albeit en espanol, El Poder de Ahora, the work in translation, though he apparently speaks Spanish himself (the English-language e-version is back-ordered for streaming at my library).  Now I haven’t thoroughly absorbed the book yet, but Eckhart Tolle just may be on to something here, something very important, the basis of our identity—or lack thereof…

    Cut to the chase, if you haven’t already: Tolle sees our identifying with our own thought processes as the source of all of our problems.  Wow!  Now I’m not exactly sure yet what he would have us identify with instead, but the effect is palpable, nonetheless. Apparently Tolle would have us identify with ‘consciousness’, albeit one without thought…  (More …)

     
  • Unknown's avatar

    hardie karges 6:23 pm on June 8, 2016 Permalink | Reply
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    Religion, Linguistics and Politics: the Muslim Problem is an Aryan Problem… 

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    The ugliest church in the world: Kabul, Afghanistan

    When you think of Islam, you generally think of the Mideast, and all things Arab.  Yet more than half of the total Muslim population lies to the east of the Shatt al-Arab, the Tigris and Euphrates rivers, and that line that separates Iraq from Iran, Arab from Aryan, them from us.  Huh?  Aryan?  Us? What gives?

    Yes it’s probably no accident that the most problematic of Muslims are our own not-so-distant relatives.  You’ve heard of the Beverly Hillbillies, right?  But what about the Kandahar Killbillies?  Yes, it’s true: one of the peskiest terrorist problems in the world comes from our own relatives from the same original ‘hood out back on the steppes, on a different stairway to a different Heaven, even if exactly the same Semitic god… (More …)

     
    • Dave Kingsbury's avatar

      Dave Kingsbury 9:20 am on June 9, 2016 Permalink | Reply

      The opposite to labelling and stereotyping … pro-evolutionary, you might say, showing how language is a wordhoard that art can use to reconstruct old ways of looking.

      • hardie karges's avatar

        hardie karges 9:25 am on June 9, 2016 Permalink | Reply

        According to prominent micro-biologist, language and DNA function almost exactly the same, in terms of evolution: “no reason why they should, but they do…”

  • Unknown's avatar

    hardie karges 11:12 am on June 5, 2016 Permalink | Reply
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    Religion 201: Lessons in Humility, Messages for Humanity… 

    Christian God

    Christian God

    “Man is the measure of all things.”  Protagoras (c.490-420 BCE) is the author of that statement, and—with all due respect—I’d say that’s the beginning of the end of us humans as spiritual animals, and the mark of our ascension to the status of corrupt malignant city-dwellers, masters of our own private little domains and little else.  On the one hand, it is a statement of the relativity of all perceptions—okay.  On the other hand, it is a statement of our ignorance and arrogance—ouch!

    We imagine that we are masters of the universe, creators of the cosmos, and lords of the lower two hundred—countries in the world, that is. This is nothing but human hubris, of course, and nothing could be further from the truth.  We live at the mercy of our machines, possessed by our possessions, in the thrall of our inventions and our inventiveness, in love with ourselves and our selfishness, enraptured by our images and our imaginations.  We wallow in our memories and our comforts and our conveniences.

    We Westerners admire ourselves, our successes, our ambitions, our madness, without even questioning the whys and wherefores of it.  We climb naked rock faces, while smiling all the time, oblivious to the danger, addicted to the climb, always looking for a faster computer and a more easily programmable car, pushing envelopes and shuffling papers, rejecting our traditions and annoying our neighbors.  Ego rules! Nobody wants to be the follower, everybody wants to be the Alpha male, while ending up the Alpha a$$hole. (More …)

     
  • Unknown's avatar

    hardie karges 8:30 am on May 29, 2016 Permalink | Reply
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    Turning 62: Exhilaration, Frustration, Reconciliation and (Buddhist) Renunciation… 

    IMG_1559Goodbye cruel world! It’s been good to know you, sorta’ kinda’ maybe you know, all your skyscrapers and automobiles and dark satanic factories and epidemics to boot, competing in the World’s Cup of Cruelty and the World Series of Savagery. Have we really learned anything in our five thousand years of civility, our ten thousand years of settlement? Not much, I reckon; the only things that change are that the weapons get bigger: the guns get longer and the fuses get shorter….

    You can have it, since there’s nothing here that I want, really, not much, anyway, just art culture religion and science. You can have the comforts, the comfort foods and the contrived conveniences (convenient contrivances?), be it hamburgers or highways—especially highways! Especially hamburgers ON highways—McD’s, Burger K’s, Dairy Q and Wendy’s! And you can have all the automobiles on them, too—self-mobile, indeed!

    I can walk faster than the traffic moves through downtown LA at rush hour, whether it’s the 101, the 110, the 5 or the 10.  But what I mostly want is a more peaceful time and more polite space, the likes of which have never really existed, but which is the ultimate function of religion and culture to produce. Why else would religion exist: to create tribal gods to lead warring groups into battle, or something silly like that? Don’t answer. (More …)

     
    • peaceof8's avatar

      peaceof8 7:44 pm on May 29, 2016 Permalink | Reply

      I absolutely love this. Me who yesterday and many days before that felt that not one thing was interesting has found just that today! Serendipity for me on this beautiful Sunday.

    • Dave Kingsbury's avatar

      davekingsbury 12:44 pm on May 30, 2016 Permalink | Reply

      Great post, Hardie, as fine as anything you’ve published! I love the sweep of your writing and its lofty perspective … echoes of Kerouac or Ginsberg’s ‘Wichita Vortex Sutra’ …

      • hardie karges's avatar

        hardie karges 1:41 pm on May 30, 2016 Permalink | Reply

        Thanks, Dave. That’s maybe the finest compliment I’ve ever received. Actually, in 1980-81 at Naropa Institute I had the pleasure of taking a course with Ginsberg, a seminar with W.S. Burroughs, room next to Gregory Corso, assorted readings by Anne Waldman, Robert Duncan and others; heady stuff, like SF North Beach 1955…

  • Unknown's avatar

    hardie karges 8:58 am on May 22, 2016 Permalink | Reply
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    Religion 313: Simple Prayer for a Tortured Earth 

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    Buddhism in Sri Lanka

    I’m not here to diss or dismiss anyone’s faith nor fantasy—quite the contrary, in fact: I hope to be part of a conversation in which all viewpoints are reconciled, and the human league is improved in its capacity for survival upon an earth grown weary from wars and wickedness, tired of mayhem and mudslinging…

    This is in fact the prime role of religion—to make you feel better in situations beyond your control, to make things feel better without taking up arms in dispute.  That religions are sometimes used as battle flags is unfortunate, of course, but hopefully only a paradigm shift away from the pages of history…

    Rome was only ultimately saved by church and religion, and I doubt that Washington will fare any better, and this is as it should be, faith in something bigger something better assuming its rightful place in the pantheon of our thoughts and highest common denominators, rather than recourse to rifles as we sink to our lowest…

    Like religion, the function of prayer is to make you feel better about whatever outcome should arise, since there is no greater truth than that we really know little or nothing about anything and control even less.  To recognize that no matter how hard you pray, the outcome is reliant mostly upon other factors is so obvious that it should be self-evident—but it’s not… (More …)

     

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