Eyeless in Ginza, Superman Agonistes…
Would that this were but the latest manifestation of many cycles of rebirth, each if only slightly better than the last, so that I could know that things were improving, if only gradually, if only incrementally, but in the right direction, something to indicate the ascent of man, not the descent, and maybe more in the manner of smiling Teilhard than grumpy Darwin, for then I could take solace in that fact and be happy…
But I can see nothing of the sort, I limited to these eyes, and this life, in this world, the only one I know, though there may be others out there somewhere, but I know them not. I only know that this is not the pure land of prophecy, we sentenced here to gravity, and suffering, because the pure land of prophecy is surely one of the purest white light, these spectral colors of the most seductive hues begging me to come down to their world of solidity, to get down and dirty with sounds, phenomena, percussion and repercussions… (More …)
Okay, so I admit it: I’m going through a crisis of confidence with my newfound love of Buddhism, and all that entails. The devil is in the details, of course, as even the ever-tricky Buddha himself well knew, just like Jesus after him, that you pick and choose what to tell the initiates and laypeople at any one time, subject to their capacity to comprehend, assimilate, or even fathom, concepts which may just be a bit difficult to swallow at first, or maybe forever…
Beyond all the fibs and fantasies, behind all the lies we tell ourselves, is the l-DNA we create for ourselves in language, a trail to our past and an arrow to our future, and pretty much the only thing we had before y-DNA and mt-DNA, revealed now to be something like a parallel universe to those more precise measurements, yet far more analogous to the largely hypothetical cultural tracks and traces, like c-DNA, full of long lonely nights and broken promises, frightened misgivings and belated thanksgivings…
The year 1953 should have been a big one for Buddhism. Something to do with Tibet, you’re probably thinking? No, something to do with the discovery of DNA, I’m thinking, because that meant that we Buddhists would no longer have to twist ourselves into human pretzels and insert our heads halfway up our… meditation postures…
Some people say Buddhism is not really a religion, though I know some monks who would beg to differ. Here’s what my dictionary says about religion:
Terborn Zult, and 
I’m paraphrasing, of course, but this is the question that has plagued—no, let’s say intrigued’—the sangha (Buddhist community) for two and a half millennia, more or less, if not in so many words, then in so many actions, cutting to the chase, and allowing for interpolations and extrapolations, i.e. whether to think big, farming ideas and allowing for fierce and free debate, or to think small, on the achievement of individual ‘liberation’ and the purging of ‘defilements’ from the composite makeshift personalities that we call ‘I’…
…of religion, science, and life, too, the mostly unrequited wish that “it’s all written,” whether in script or bar-code, to the point of retro-fitting the logic that may or may not have actually led up to some fait accompli, though that accomplished fact was never predicted even at the point of inception. This is the need for happy endings, and the one overriding narrative that drives all others, the one theory of everything…
streaming consciousness... 
Dave Kingsbury 3:32 pm on July 2, 2018 Permalink |
This seeks to burst the limitations with a very effective experimental edge, Hardie. At the same time, down to earth …
hardie karges 4:52 am on July 3, 2018 Permalink |
Thanx for the vote of confidence, Dave. Experiment is risky but necessary, for me at least, to clear out the cobwebs that clog consciousness. Sometimes I feel I’ve sacrificed my life to it, though, not sure if it’s for better or worse, haha…