Short Spark

from http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hanged,_drawn_and_quartered

The sentence of hanging, drawing, and quartering punished the guilty traitor via his body. Although gruesome and cruel by today’s standards, the practice was a logical legal mechanism that reflected complex conceptual understandings of the time. It magnified and inverted the crime perpetrated on the integrity of the king by mutilating and completely destroying the physical body of the traitor. Various steps involved in the penalty worked to stamp the authority of the monarch on the criminal and to purge the threat by marking the dishonour of the condemned. Central to this punishment was the understanding that the physical body and individual were inextricably intertwined even immediately after death. Therefore, it followed that the penalty should operate by targeting the body.

- Maeve Jones

the practice was a logical legal mechanism that reflected complex conceptual understandings of the time.

I have rarely heard such complete utter bullshit. Some people unfortunately are educated way beyond their intellectual capacities and come up with a shitload of crap in the name of education, bad image on McGill or just twisted usual human nature?

To associate the words logical and complex and conceptual to something that was primarily feral, Barbarian, cruel and misguided is just beyond words. For it was not only a “good” king that could order such atrocities but also a “bad”, “ugly”, “evil” king for purposes as dark as his evil heart could imagine. It was nothing short at times than a tyrannic bully expressing his tyranny very violently to put fear into all his other subjects in case they were tiring of his bullying antics.

So puhlease spare me the logical, complex concept and put your head back up your ass where it was so we have peace and silence again at last.

We still have way too much conceptual logical complex napalm and friendly fire and collateral damage, genocides and all sort of other atrocities going on on this supposedly civilised planet: Monkeys with guns trying to talk shit to explain the sanguinary huge fucking mess. Spare me your sanctimonious bullshit and call a spade a spade.

If you move, you got a carrot!

How sublime is that? J Very Zen I find. It implies that all actions are towards a dangling carrot one never reaches like the proverbial ass/donkey.

Some sort of Sisyphean Cosmic Carrot I suppose.

Speaking of my favourite hero, Sisyphus, anyone can tell me why he didn’t just sit on the rock or on the ground and just say: FUCK IT! I guess his Guardian`s Guantanamo treatment might have been more painful than pushing the stupid boulder.

It does sound a bit silly and vain but then again we have a gazillion Sisyphuses on this planet pushing and sweating in vain.

That big Cosmic Carrot though seems to be a prize winner. It`s where all the Vikings massacres and kamikazes and suicide bombers came from among many others like errrrr most religious people in fact because no one ever reaches the bloody carrot and no one ever knows for sure if the damn thing is real to begin with or one of those holographic illusions à la Star Trek.

So in the sake of concision

(Anyone read the Art of Concision in 72 Volumes?)

How about that statement? If you move, you got a carrot (with the silent but obvious dangling at the end of the stick implied).

I guess adepts of meditation might want to cut the Damocles Sword Thread of the Cosmic Carrot and be done with it. So all we need then is a spiritual bistouri or Golden Scissors. But before all that though one absolutely needs an Epiphany of the Dangling Carrot, the proverbial carrot has to become transparent as Alanis says so we can see right through it and realize the carrot is nothing but an unattainable holographic illusion held either by some power freak (usually political or religious), or your own greatly illusional/delusional soul so therefore your running after it is not only stupid and vain but downright embarrassing.

Wonder if cutting the carrot thread would be similar to cutting the Silver Cord or breaking the Golden Bowl?

Death is the Ultimate Thread-Cutter, Stick-Breaker, and Carrot-Squasher. But one may not have to wait for it and have Nirvana/Heaven on Earth! Down with the Carrot! Off with its head!

Ecc 12:6-8 Or ever the silver cord be loosed, or the golden bowl be broken, or the pitcher be broken at the fountain, or the wheel broken at the cistern.

Then shall the dust return to the earth as it was: and the spirit shall return unto God who gave it.

Vanity of vanities, saith the preacher; all is vanity.

Solomon sounder a bit more authoritative than Lobsang Rampa on that Silver Cord: a very nice metaphor either way, that Golden Bowl being close to Emile Nelligan`s Golden Vessel.

Now back to earth though there is a couple of `moves` one would have to keep necessary: For instance a trip to the loo or reaching in the fridge for a beer or something?

Current Falling Stars

“I like too many things and get all confused and hung-up running from one falling star to another till i drop. This is the night, what it does to you. I had nothing to offer anybody except my own confusion.” - Jack Kerouac

On my many falling stars here I find them innumerable and exhausting for one knows after a while that one is just running in the mouse wheel going nowhere and one keeps running for no reason at all just because.

all around me are familiar faces
worn out places
worn out faces
bright and early for the daily races
going nowhere
going nowhere

- Gary Jules

To mention the last ones, having had an interest lately in mindfulness as a solution to some problems here as a very short fuse that is consuming me altogether and an uncontrollable irritation towards noise, I look at the Zen approach as a good thing, maybe an anchor of salvation to make my life and my wife`s life much smoother.

So me being me, here I am spread all over the place like a rash, Thich Nanh Hahn, Jon Kabat-Zinn, Jack Kornfield, and you name it I am there, trying to assimilate thousands of years and thousands of sects of Buddhism in one night if I can. J

Now I see Thich and that Eckhart guy have been on Oprah and that rings a very loud alarm as Oprah and I go a long way not being friends. J I consider anyone showing on her show as a sell-out and close to a whore really, in fact I think I have much more respect for whores as they are more honest.

I do respect some group who offer you to share their `divine` knowledge with you and only expect donations at the END of the session like the Vipassana monks. Somehow also I cling to this old saying of Jesus that if the World loves you something is deadly wrong with you and I would add that if Oprah wants you, you are doomed and damned for eternity.

Plus I read some sort of association with self-immolation in the Thich group and that was pretty well the clincher...preaching that all life is sacred and precious except yours doesn`t sit well with me at all.

So anyway to keep this short, I know that I will assist to every meeting of DBT/Mindfulness and hope to find some relief and continuity in this but my past patterns do not call for continuity in anything which is quite exhausting and Sisyphean to bear.

Always been taunted and teased by Buddhism even though at heart there are too many roads and even more too many road blocks for me to seriously explore that path. Plus it is becoming a well known fact that I don`t stick to nothing, pardon the double negative, my middle name should be Tefal. “Tout nouveau tout beau” (All new, all nice literally) is what I have been told quite a few times, I should have seen the light about my brain chemical situation years ago.

`Tis a hard life to be a cynic and a sceptic I tell you!

If I was to look for a form of ZEN path I would look for one where I don`t have to bow to anyone and anything. I prefer this form of equality to many others: you don’t bow to me and I don’t bow to you instead of all the kowtowing. Plus I am extremely reluctant to bow to plastic, plaster, silver or gold or any icon or image, call me an iconoclast I guess.

Basically on a personal understanding of the primal message of the Bible that God is Spirit and is to be worshipped in Spirit and that bottom line story is

Act 15:28 For it seemed good to the Holy Ghost, and to us, to lay upon you no greater burden than these necessary things;

Act 15:29 That ye abstain from meats offered to idols, and from blood, and from things strangled, and from fornication: from which if ye keep yourselves, ye shall do well. Fare ye well.

Act 17:29 Forasmuch then as we are the offspring of God, we ought not to think that the Godhead is like unto gold, or silver, or stone, graven by art and man's device.

Idolatry seems to be THE Big No No throughout both the OT and the NT.

So the form where modern science (in the image of psychology) fornicates with religion of old might have to do for me! :)

Both have their false gods and creators. Linehan created DBT.

Linehan is the developer of Dialectical Behavior Therapy (DBT), a type of psychotherapy that combines behavioral science with concepts of acceptance and mindfulness, derived from eastern and western contemplative practices.

Dialectic (also called dialectics or the dialectical method) is a method of argument, which has been central to both Indic and Western philosophy since ancient times. The word "dialectic" originates in Ancient Greece, and was made popular by Plato's Socratic dialogues. Dialectic is based on a dialogue between two or more people who hold different ideas and wish to persuade each other. This is in contrast to rhetoric, which is a relatively long oration conducted by a single person, a method favored by the Sophists.^[1] Different forms of dialectical reason have emerged in the Indosphere and in the West, as well as during different eras of history (see below). Among the major forms of dialectic reason are Socratic, Hindu,Buddhist, Medieval, Hegelian, Marxist, and Talmudic.

Now if this is not complicated enough let`s ELIDE on it! J

Arguably her signal contribution was to elide the adversarial paradigm implicit in the hierarchical modernist therapeutic alliance

to elide To break or dash in pieces; to demolish.

1. To cut off, as a vowel or a syllable, usually the final one.

2. To distract from or evade (a question or line of argument)

Is it me or does elide sound a little slimy? Slippery ways of deception or some would call it conviction.

One of those thousands fallacies of rhetoric or DIALECTIC; therefore the ARGUABLY! J

Dontcha just LOVE Semantics? J

Mind you it is pretty well “Necessary” if one wants to marry two conflicting worlds. Science and Religion have never been too comfortable lying in the same bed as both hate each other`s guts and cannot stand one another.

Particularly obvious recently in the nihilist positions of Dr. House and Dr. Temperance "Bones" Brennan.

One has to do a lot of “SKATING” to disguise the stench of the source and make it palatable to so-called intellectuals, minor or major.

I had a good laugh this week when I read that Georges Santayana’s father Ruiz de Santayana was a colonial civil servant, painter, and minor intellectual.

I want that one too on my epitaph now:

Poet, Philosopher, Failure and Minor Intellectual! J

Jain dialectic

These seven propositions also known as saptabhangi are:^[49]

1. syād-asti – "in some ways it is"

2. syād-nāsti - "in some ways it is not"

3. syād-asti-nāsti - "in some ways it is and it is not"

4. syād-asti-avaktavyaḥ - "in some ways it is and it is indescribable"

5. syād-nāsti-avaktavyaḥ - "in some ways it is not and it is indescribable"

6. syād-asti-nāsti-avaktavyaḥ - "in some ways it is, it is not and it is indescribable"

7. syād-avaktavyaḥ - "in some ways it is indescribable"

Anyone who is NOT confused does NOT know what is going on!

Before I came here I was confused about this subject. Having listened to your lecture I am still confused. But on a higher level.
Enrico Fermi

con-fusion: if you're not confused, you're not paying attention.

And con-fusion is what is going to happen soon if I keep studying all this. Con With FUSION!

My mind is going to melt in one big ugly lump of yuck!

Ecc 12:12 And further, by these, my son, be admonished: of making many books there is no end; and much study is a weariness of the flesh.

In some ways it is!

Good Ole Sol! Always loved him!