Five noble precepts
Focus mind, body, and soul
So that they all shine
[ americanifesto / 場黑麥 / jpr / urbanartopia / whorphan ]
Showing posts with label focus. Show all posts
Showing posts with label focus. Show all posts
03 August 2018
21 August 2017
and rebirth beckons
Hopes fails, dreams shatter. Sadness emerges, and, with it, fear. Concern for one’s own future sharpens, fear blossoming into anger. And then anger mutates into self-righteous indignation at anything perceived to be the root cause of one’s problems. Even if the people or choices targeted actually have nothing to do with one’s problems, they become the focus of one’s hatred.
Within the morally vacuous, cacophonous self-pity factories that social media sites and other internet message boards often are, one’s indignation grows while at the same time, however, the size and origin of one’s problems stay the same. Soon, anger spills over into aggression, hot and sour words hurled unnecessarily at others in one’s web of contacts. The hurt doesn’t go away, prompting one to pile on the grief in an effort to smother it. Still, it lingers, now a sucking and festering wound wrapped tightly around the once-soothing tendrils of ever-loving heartspace.
Gradually, one’s web of social contacts shrinks, its individual strands broken, severed, neglected. More and more isolated does one then become, so isolated and lonely in fact that fear and anger appear more and more real. Suddenly, it’s all one can seem to think about, how stupid and foolish and misguided everyone else is, how simple the solutions to this nation’s and this city’s and this block’s problems are. ‘If only people would just listen to me,’ one thinks, an angry, lonely voice screaming into the yawning void. Pitiable, the soul struggling to withstand twin onslaughts of negativity and self-loathing, the world suddenly an evil and unwelcoming place, the last strands give out.
Yet there within the charred and blackened ruins of one’s real and online lives glimmer, diamond-like, the compressed jewels of love, hope, and compassion. And rebirth beckons.
americanifesto / 場黑麥 / jpr / urbanartopia / whorphan
Within the morally vacuous, cacophonous self-pity factories that social media sites and other internet message boards often are, one’s indignation grows while at the same time, however, the size and origin of one’s problems stay the same. Soon, anger spills over into aggression, hot and sour words hurled unnecessarily at others in one’s web of contacts. The hurt doesn’t go away, prompting one to pile on the grief in an effort to smother it. Still, it lingers, now a sucking and festering wound wrapped tightly around the once-soothing tendrils of ever-loving heartspace.
Gradually, one’s web of social contacts shrinks, its individual strands broken, severed, neglected. More and more isolated does one then become, so isolated and lonely in fact that fear and anger appear more and more real. Suddenly, it’s all one can seem to think about, how stupid and foolish and misguided everyone else is, how simple the solutions to this nation’s and this city’s and this block’s problems are. ‘If only people would just listen to me,’ one thinks, an angry, lonely voice screaming into the yawning void. Pitiable, the soul struggling to withstand twin onslaughts of negativity and self-loathing, the world suddenly an evil and unwelcoming place, the last strands give out.
Yet there within the charred and blackened ruins of one’s real and online lives glimmer, diamond-like, the compressed jewels of love, hope, and compassion. And rebirth beckons.
americanifesto / 場黑麥 / jpr / urbanartopia / whorphan
10 August 2016
allow the yang
When I see an attractive woman who I get the feeling might find me attractive too, my chi tends to slam up into the 6th chakra from where it normally resides in the 2nd, 3rd, or 4th. Instead of approaching her and saying hello, as my lower nodes are telling me to do, a voyeuristic and deeply insecure part of me pulls inward and launches a furious attempt to calculate just how much she might like me as well as how best to get her to not like me. The bundled chi energies start heating up my physical flesh from the eyebrows on backward, the 3rd eye area, as I strain to think of something to say to her. Women pick up on this immediately, fleeing from sickly waves of needing, wanting, yearning energy that lash from the yet-shadowy depths of what, in short, is a pocket of pain. I’ve come to understand, with time and conscious effort, that in the left-rear quadrant of the 6th chakra lives my ego, or at least a fear-body that kicks in if when encountering women I allow these strong yin to overwhelm the yang of the 6th. This pocket, a largely Read Only Memory part of my consciousness, was in early youth hijacked by irrational forces, should my recollections hold true. If the hijacker was an outside party, it could have arrived during a spell of fever-dreams around age nine or ten. In one of these dreams, I became aware of a brilliantly white space of indeterminate size - the Great Vast Crushing Nothingness mentioned in earlier works. My sense of self was in extreme flux, shrinking and growing from infinitely large to impossibly small, sometimes both simultaneously; and into this space appeared a being not of my own design, a vaguely humanoid figure that appeared in front of me before rising up and to the left of my field of vision. This entity spoke to me not with words but feelings, a sense of tremendous and all-reaching power. (I have no strongly negative memories of this dream / visitation, rather ones of gut-wrenching and paralyzing awe.) If this pocket started as an autochthonous formation, however, I suspect it festered into existence in those first teenage years in Germany when the ‘rents were on poor terms; I was struggling with learning the language yet still going to school in it as well as learning to play the trumpet with my teeth in braces; and my few friends and I were on a collision course with catastrophe. I internalized a lot of loneliness and self-loathing during that time, venting it as my teens progressed in ever fool-hardier ventures. Whether by either of these two ways, or by another, the dominance of this pocket of pain is shrinking in direct correlation to a growing self-awareness helped along by spiritual and meditation work done on the Island of the Gods. Through impartial observance and daily practice, its strength will diminish further - if my good fortune holds, that is.
© americanifesto / 場黑麥
24 October 2012
no third candidate
Occasionally, while at home or in my car, I listen to NPR, to catch the news and maybe an interesting show or two. In the weeks leading up to the period in this year of 2012 when the electoral collage shall again appoint someone to be president of these United States of America, my local public radio station, WITF, has been focusing much of its attention on this impending appointment, analyzing debates, reporting on the results of different polls, and airing interviews of average citizens and government officials alike. During one segment, this news outlet asked political scientists, pollsters, and focus groups to craft a third-party candidate who might stand a chance of liberating our electoral process from the chains of our current two-party political duopoly (which is effectively a single-party-monopoly, since the asses and the pachyderms are so similar to one another as to be two sides of the same coin). I admit that I only caught the first segment of this show, and part of the second; I did not hear the opinions of the focus groups, only a brief summary thereof; but I fully agreed with the political scientists, who conjured up a candidate bent on freeing America from under the weight of her massively overgrown federal government, a person dedicated to the idea that all persons of legal age should have the right to decide what substances to put into their bodies, be those substances alcohol, hashish, cocaine, tobacco, heroin, or caffeine.
Curiously, however, I did not hear mention of governor Gary Johnson, the candidate for the Libertarian Party in America, who, with a few exceptions, is (with a capital I) the physical embodiment of the the third-party candidate dreamed up by WITF's political scientists. Furthermore, this once-dependable medium failed to mention Dr. Jill Stein, the candidate for America's Green Party, who made such a strong showing at last night's third-party candidates' debate that she has all but won my vote. Pollsters and focus-groups aside (poll numbers are so easily skewed as to make them all but useless, and focus-grouping is for rich people and big corporations that are too risk-averse to make up their own minds), I found it shameful that a public radio group would prove itself so deeply entrenched in the political status-quo as to not even consider mentioning the Libertarian or Green Parties as valid third options for voters sick and tired of America's twin big-business political juggernauts. (It is inconceivable, undemocratic, and unjust that in a land of more than 150,000,000 persons of voting age just 2 political parties have all the power.)
When the wealth of a nation is on the table, the few persons holding the purse-strings will rarely let them go; when the long-term future of a nation is at stake, the fools who got it into the mess in the first place will say anything to shift the blame onto someone else's shoulders. I cannot truly fault WITF, or NPR, for staying with the herd and pretending that debates between but two of the half-dozen candidates contending for the electoral college's appointment to the presidency could in any way change the outcome of the farce that will occur this November 6th. The only hope for America, the only way for us to strip the bloated political machines of their power, is to reshape the entire fabric of this nation; we start by saying, aloud: “This bullshit has gone on for too long”; we start by demanding that the ideals set forth in our Declaration of Independence and Constitution are secured for us diligently and without further waffling; we start by standing out in the cold and in the rain and forcing the slumbering among us back into wakefulness. We can have Liberty, equality, and justice in this land, but only if we are willing to fight for them, every day of our lives. Mahalo.
© mentiri factorem fecit (場黑麥)
Curiously, however, I did not hear mention of governor Gary Johnson, the candidate for the Libertarian Party in America, who, with a few exceptions, is (with a capital I) the physical embodiment of the the third-party candidate dreamed up by WITF's political scientists. Furthermore, this once-dependable medium failed to mention Dr. Jill Stein, the candidate for America's Green Party, who made such a strong showing at last night's third-party candidates' debate that she has all but won my vote. Pollsters and focus-groups aside (poll numbers are so easily skewed as to make them all but useless, and focus-grouping is for rich people and big corporations that are too risk-averse to make up their own minds), I found it shameful that a public radio group would prove itself so deeply entrenched in the political status-quo as to not even consider mentioning the Libertarian or Green Parties as valid third options for voters sick and tired of America's twin big-business political juggernauts. (It is inconceivable, undemocratic, and unjust that in a land of more than 150,000,000 persons of voting age just 2 political parties have all the power.)
When the wealth of a nation is on the table, the few persons holding the purse-strings will rarely let them go; when the long-term future of a nation is at stake, the fools who got it into the mess in the first place will say anything to shift the blame onto someone else's shoulders. I cannot truly fault WITF, or NPR, for staying with the herd and pretending that debates between but two of the half-dozen candidates contending for the electoral college's appointment to the presidency could in any way change the outcome of the farce that will occur this November 6th. The only hope for America, the only way for us to strip the bloated political machines of their power, is to reshape the entire fabric of this nation; we start by saying, aloud: “This bullshit has gone on for too long”; we start by demanding that the ideals set forth in our Declaration of Independence and Constitution are secured for us diligently and without further waffling; we start by standing out in the cold and in the rain and forcing the slumbering among us back into wakefulness. We can have Liberty, equality, and justice in this land, but only if we are willing to fight for them, every day of our lives. Mahalo.
© mentiri factorem fecit (場黑麥)
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