Livin Your Best Life

First topic message reminder :

“Nature’s first green is gold,
Her hardest hue to hold.
Her early leaf’s a flower;
But only so an hour.
Then leaf subsides to leaf.
So Eden sank to grief,
So dawn goes down to day.
Nothing gold can stay.”

—Robert Frost - “Nothing Gold Can Stay”

34

The rich man feasted in his high hall,
Bright torches shining everywhere,
When a man too poor to own a lamp
Crept to the side to share in the glow.
Who would think they would drive him away,
Back again to his place in the dark?
“Will one more person detract from your light?
Strange, to begrudge me a leftover beam!”

—Cold Mountain

Make your life mythic and it will be.

Don’t squander your breath or your gas.

Be worthy of this love.

strange tides

moon shows
ocean slows
heart flows
mind blows
body glows
daimon knows

Everything I write is meant to inspire self expression and individuation.

Write openly about yourself to be yourself.

“The writer of these lines has nothing whatsoever to teach anyone; his words are just his contribution to our common discussion of what must inevitably be for us the most important subject which could be discussed by sentient beings."

—Wei Wu Wei

“Tell your heart that the fear of suffering is worse than the suffering itself and that no heart has ever suffered when it goes in search of its dreams, because every second of the search is a second’s encounter with God and with eternity.”

—The Alchemist

“Don’t be concerned with other people’s impressions of you. They are dazzled and deluded by appearances. Stick with your purpose. This alone will strengthen your will and give your life coherence.”

—Epictetus

I have one burning purpose, to live the best life possible and inspire others to the same, have a great one!

The Egg

By: Andy Weir

You were on your way home when you died.

It was a car accident. Nothing particularly remarkable, but fatal nonetheless. You left behind a wife and two children. It was a painless death. The EMTs tried their best to save you, but to no avail. Your body was so utterly shattered you were better off, trust me.

And that’s when you met me.

“What… what happened?” You asked. “Where am I?”

“You died,” I said, matter-of-factly. No point in mincing words.

“There was a… a truck and it was skidding…”

“Yup,” I said.

“I… I died?”

“Yup. But don’t feel bad about it. Everyone dies,” I said.

You looked around. There was nothingness. Just you and me. “What is this place?” You asked. “Is this the afterlife?”

“More or less,” I said.

“Are you god?” You asked.

“Yup,” I replied. “I’m God.”

“My kids… my wife,” you said.

“What about them?”

“Will they be all right?”

“That’s what I like to see,” I said. “You just died and your main concern is for your family. That’s good stuff right there.”

You looked at me with fascination. To you, I didn’t look like God. I just looked like some man. Or possibly a woman. Some vague authority figure, maybe. More of a grammar school teacher than the almighty.

“Don’t worry,” I said. “They’ll be fine. Your kids will remember you as perfect in every way. They didn’t have time to grow contempt for you. Your wife will cry on the outside, but will be secretly relieved. To be fair, your marriage was falling apart. If it’s any consolation, she’ll feel very guilty for feeling relieved.”

“Oh,” you said. “So what happens now? Do I go to heaven or hell or something?”

“Neither,” I said. “You’ll be reincarnated.”

“Ah,” you said. “So the Hindus were right,”

“All religions are right in their own way,” I said. “Walk with me.”

You followed along as we strode through the void. “Where are we going?”

“Nowhere in particular,” I said. “It’s just nice to walk while we talk.”

“So what’s the point, then?” You asked. “When I get reborn, I’ll just be a blank slate, right? A baby. So all my experiences and everything I did in this life won’t matter.”

“Not so!” I said. “You have within you all the knowledge and experiences of all your past lives. You just don’t remember them right now.”

I stopped walking and took you by the shoulders. “Your soul is more magnificent, beautiful, and gigantic than you can possibly imagine. A human mind can only contain a tiny fraction of what you are. It’s like sticking your finger in a glass of water to see if it’s hot or cold. You put a tiny part of yourself into the vessel, and when you bring it back out, you’ve gained all the experiences it had.

“You’ve been in a human for the last 48 years, so you haven’t stretched out yet and felt the rest of your immense consciousness. If we hung out here for long enough, you’d start remembering everything. But there’s no point to doing that between each life.”

“How many times have I been reincarnated, then?”

“Oh lots. Lots and lots. An in to lots of different lives.” I said. “This time around, you’ll be a Chinese peasant girl in 540 AD.”

“Wait, what?” You stammered. “You’re sending me back in time?”

“Well, I guess technically. Time, as you know it, only exists in your universe. Things are different where I come from.”

“Where you come from?” You said.

“Oh sure,” I explained “I come from somewhere. Somewhere else. And there are others like me. I know you’ll want to know what it’s like there, but honestly you wouldn’t understand.”

“Oh,” you said, a little let down. “But wait. If I get reincarnated to other places in time, I could have interacted with myself at some point.”

“Sure. Happens all the time. And with both lives only aware of their own lifespan you don’t even know it’s happening.”

“So what’s the point of it all?”

“Seriously?” I asked. “Seriously? You’re asking me for the meaning of life? Isn’t that a little stereotypical?”

“Well it’s a reasonable question,” you persisted.

I looked you in the eye. “The meaning of life, the reason I made this whole universe, is for you to mature.”

“You mean mankind? You want us to mature?”

“No, just you. I made this whole universe for you. With each new life you grow and mature and become a larger and greater intellect.”

“Just me? What about everyone else?”

“There is no one else,” I said. “In this universe, there’s just you and me.”

You stared blankly at me. “But all the people on earth…”

“All you. Different incarnations of you.”

“Wait. I’m everyone!?”

“Now you’re getting it,” I said, with a congratulatory slap on the back.

“I’m every human being who ever lived?”

“Or who will ever live, yes.”

“I’m Abraham Lincoln?”

“And you’re John Wilkes Booth, too,” I added.

“I’m Hitler?” You said, appalled.

“And you’re the millions he killed.”

“I’m Jesus?”

“And you’re everyone who followed him.”

You fell silent.

“Every time you victimized someone,” I said, “you were victimizing yourself. Every act of kindness you’ve done, you’ve done to yourself. Every happy and sad moment ever experienced by any human was, or will be, experienced by you.”

You thought for a long time.

“Why?” You asked me. “Why do all this?”

“Because someday, you will become like me. Because that’s what you are. You’re one of my kind. You’re my child.”

“Whoa,” you said, incredulous. “You mean I’m a god?”

“No. Not yet. You’re a fetus. You’re still growing. Once you’ve lived every human life throughout all time, you will have grown enough to be born.”

“So the whole universe,” you said, “it’s just…”

“An egg.” I answered. “Now it’s time for you to move on to your next life.”

And I sent you on your way.

I support a team of highly effective engineers.

We build great things.

I build high performing teams.

I don’t lead them.

I don’t teach them.

I demonstrate how to be great.

Because I know what is great inside of me.

And I call this forth in them.

An essay I wrote at work recently that has made quite a big splash.

It might even lead to a promotion.

Not because I wrote the article, because I build great teams.

High functioning networks of individuals.

I hand pick them.

I can always use more nickels to rub together.

Be great!

…

Be a Great Engineer, Be a Great Human Being

I have been having a little debate on my team with some of the younger engineers. I like to wrestle with them. I enjoy a good wrestling match. They get me down on the mat sometimes, but they can’t pin me, yet. Well, old goats know a trick or two to make up for being so dumb and stubborn.

When I wrestle, both win. I don’t try to beat my opponent. I want to share a superpower that will make a good engineer great and give you an advantage over 99% of the folks working today. I know this to be a fact, as I have lived it and from experience, I can tell you the theme in the below article works.

A great engineer is not the most intelligent or highest paid, they are the ones who get the most done in a clutch, exerting the best amount of energy, for maximum effect. It ain’t always pretty or evident who is holding things up on their shoulders. No one may notice your contribution, but you know. That’s why you don’t have to work 80 hours a week to be great. If you work that way, you will be the worst actually.

Until you have honed this superpower, it will feel counterintuitive and strange exercising it. Give this a chance maybe. We are not independent minds and contributors, we are a team, a network.

A great team is not a higharchy, it’s more like a self organizing mesh network, look it up. https://lnkd.in/gaJs8_5z The node that makes the most connections, is the best. You extend the network one node at a time. You can have a full or partial network. One big benefit is a node doesn’t need the strongest signal to talk to a central station, it needs just enough to send info to the nearest nodes. When the nodes are connected optimally, you get a much more consistent, even speed across the network. Because a mesh network provides multiple possible paths for transferring data from point A to point B, the network will preferentially use the fastest most efficient path. But if that path becomes blocked or congested for some reason, alternate paths can be and are used instead.

Thus, a team is only as good as its connections between its members. This superpower will help you to design and implement the best solutions. I learned this at Adobe for 5 years. A guy named Steven Webster taught me this. I wasn’t very good at this at the time. This superpower will supercharge your interactions with teammates too. Don’t judge the other, always lend a helping hand.

When I interview someone, it is the soft skills that are most important to me. I know using these, I get the biggest bang for my effort and best teams. Practice them and you will see. Study what makes teams great. Study yourself. Brutally refactor and cut away what is not needed. Practice. They take years to develop. Be great! I don’t hire calculators or machines, I hire human beings.

And what is this superpower?

Empathy

Article - https://lnkd.in/gfgmhkPx

You know, it’s funny.

I met all my daemons and they turned out to be friends.

I was terrified of them all my life.

But now, I see they are very beautiful and each their own being.

Am I just a part of them or they me?

Both I guess I’d have to say.

Schizophrenia must be the dissolution of a governing personality and then one must just switch between these modes.

Are we better with a governing personality?

That’s the mirror 🪞

If you ignore them, they seem to tear your life apart.

Speak to them.

Ask them what they want.

They will speak to you.

They spoke to me as a child.

I would see lights in the closet.

I’d see arms coming out the walls.

It was terrifying.

But now, I talk to them as easily as I am writing this.

Well, not that easy.

There is a price.

Your grasp on your life as just your own.

You don’t belong to yourself.

You never did.

You just squeezed your eyes shut and made yourself up to hide from them.

But you can’t hide.

Face them and let them be with you.

They love you.

Let them out for a stroll now and then.

Watch out.

They are mischievous little devils.

Yes, nice to have friends

Love in a Blizzard

I had felt myself slowing down like the sap oozing from an old wounded pine with a thousand self inflicted cuts

Life had left its mark on me inside and out and stripped me down to naked red bare skin and had left some bone exposed

When she found me I was suffering from exposure like an old gold miner past his prime freezing in a blizzard fumbling with matches to make a fire

The howling snow had blasted away the sand and dirt that I had used to fill in the cracks in my broken soul and exposed a crying little boy underneath

I had destroyed my old childhood faith and and taken joy telling my family and friends to take their false religion and go to hell before heading into the wild mountains

My heart was raw and sore but open for the first time in my life like an open heart patient on the table fading away in the middle of a blizzard

The words that came from my mouth were honest but my mouth was dry and cracked from the cold and my head ached from a 40 year bender

My only friend left was my old lab with me in the storm who I barely knew and who was still afraid of my anger and wouldn’t come close to me in the storm

She found me there almost dead and led me to her warm cabin in the middle of the woods and she made me some tea and gave me some bread

A message from the Devil.

…

I did a recording on YouTube awhile ago, a reading from Carl Jung’s Red Book and this morning had a very fun interaction with a young man, a beautiful butterfly regarding it.

He really wanted to share this with me below. As I had been talking about communing with our Daemon(s)/Daimon(s).

Went on for a couple hours back and forth in the video comments.

Quite extraordinary.

I met these Cabiri on the psychedelics and Jung wrote a lot about them. Read this dialogue maybe.

Now this is a sermon!

This is a symphony!

What I seek is the gold.

And I found it.

Indeed I did.

“Nature’s first green is gold,
Her hardest hue to hold.
Her early leaf’s a flower;
But only so an hour.
Then leaf subsides to leaf.
So Eden sank to grief,
So dawn goes down to day.
Nothing gold can stay.”

—Robert Frost - “Nothing Gold Can Stay”

The thing about the elves, they come back and help you grow green vines that encase your and remove the poison from your mind and heart and veins.

Then the green vines, transmute to gold.

I met them again in my garden after I cut the knot.

My madness healed, they have become friends now.

…

From Carl Jung's Red Book:

What serviceable forms rise from your body, you thieving abyss! These appear as elemental spirits, dressed in wrinkled garb, Cabiri, with delightful misshapen forms, young and yet old, dwarfish, shriveled, unspectacular bearers of secret arts, possessors of ridiculous wisdom, first formations of the unformed gold, worms that crawl from the liberated egg of the Gods, incipient ones, unborn, still invisible. What should your appearance be to us?

What new arts do you bear up from the inaccessible treasure chamber, the sun yoke from the egg of the Gods. You still have roots in the soil like plants and you are animal faces / of the human body; you are foolishly sweet, uncanny, primordial, and earthly. We cannot grasp your essence, you gnomes, you object souls.

You have your origin in the lowest. Do you want to become giants, you Tom Thumb? Do you belong to the followers of the son of the earth? Are you the earthly feet of the Godhead?

What do you want?

Speak!

The Cabiri: "We come to greet you as the master of the lower nature."

I: ''Are you speaking to mer Am I your master?"

The Cabiri: "You were not, but you are now."

I: "So you declare. And so be it. Yet what should I do with your following?"

The Cabiri: "We carry what is not to be carried from below to above. We are the juices that rise secretly, not by force, but sucked out of inertia and affixed to what is growing. We know the unknown ways and the inexplicable laws of living matter. We carry up what slumbers in the earthly; what is dead and yet enters into the living. We do this slowly and easily; what you do in vain in your human way. We complete what is impossible for you."

I: "What should I leave to you? Which troubles can I transfer to you? What should I not do, and what do you do better?"

The Cabiri: "You forget the lethargy of matter. You want to pull up with your own force what can only rise slowly; ingesting itself affixed to itself from within. Spare yourself the trouble, or
you will disturb our work."

1: "Should I trust you, you untrustworthy ones, you slaves and slave souls? Get to work. Let it be so."

“It seems to me that I gave you a long time. Neither did I descend to you nor did I disturb your work. I lived in the light of day and did the work of the day. What did you do?"

The Cabiri: "We hauled things up, we built. We placed stone upon stone. Now you stand on solid ground."

1: "I feel the ground more solid. I stretch upward."

The Cabiri: "We forged a flashing / sword for you, with which you can cut the knot that entangles you."

1: "I take the sword firmly in my hand. I lift it for the blow."

The Cabiri: "We also place before you the devilish, skillfully twined knot that locks and seals you. Strike, only sharpness will cut through it."

1: "Let me see it, the great knot, all wound round! Truly a masterpiece of inscrutable nature, a wily natural tangle of roots grown through one another! Only Mother Nature, the blind weaver, could work such a tangle! A great snarled ball and a thousand small knots, all artfully tied, intertwined, truly; a human brain! Am I seeing straight? What did you do? You set my brain before me! Did you give me a sword so that its flashing sharpness slices through my brain? What were you thinking of?”

The Cabiri: "The womb of nature wove the brain, the womb of the earth gave the iron. So the Mother gave you both: entanglement and severing."

1: "Mysterious! Do you really want to make me the executioner of my own brain?"

The Cabiri: "It befits you as the master of the lower nature. Man is entangled in his brain and the sword is also given to him to cut through the entanglement."

I: "What is the entanglement you speak of?"

The Cabiri: "The entanglement is your madness, the sword is the overcoming of madness."

I: "You offsprings of the devil, who told you that I am mad? You earth spirits, you roots of clay and excrement, are you not yourselves the root fibers of my brain? You polyp-snared rubbish, channels for juice knotted together, parasites upon parasites, all sucked up and deceived, secretly climbing up over one another by night, you deserve the flashing sharpness of my sword. You want to persuade me to cut through you? Are you contemplating self-destruction? How come nature gives birth to creatures that she herself wants to destroy?"

The Cabiri: "Do not hesitate. We need destruction since we ourselves are the entanglement. He who wishes to conquer new land / brings down the bridges behind him. Let us not exist anymore. We are the thousand canals in which everything also flows back again into its origin."

1: "Should I sever my own roots? Kill my own people, whose king I am? Should I make my own tree wither? You really are the sons of the devil."

The Cabiri: "Strike, we are servants who want to die for their master."

I: "What will happen if I strike?"

The Cabiri: "Then you will no longer be your brain, but will exist beyond your madness. Do you not see, your madness is your brain, the terrible entanglement and intertwining in the connection of the roots, in the nets of canals, the confusion of fibers. Being engrossed in the brain makes you wild. Strike! He who finds the way rises up over his brain. You are a Tom Thumb in the brain, beyond the brain you gain the form of a giant. We are surely sons of the devil, but did you not forge us out of the hot and dark? So we have something of its nature and of yours. The devil says that everything that exists is also worthy, since it perishes. As sons of the devil we want destruction, but as your creatures we want our own destruction. We want to rise up in you through death. We are roots that suck up from all sides. Now you have everything that you need, therefore chop us up, tear us out."

1: "Will I m'iss you as servants? As a master I need slaves."

The Cabiri: "The master serves himself"

1: "You ambiguous sons of the devil, these words are your undoing. May my sword strike you, this blow shall be valid forever."

The Cabiri "Woe, woe! What we feared, what we desired, has come to pass."

—

The Cabiri were the deities celebrated at the mysteries of Samothrace. They were held to be promoters of fertility and protectors of sailors. Friedrich Creuzer and Schelling held them to be the primal deities of Greek mythology, from which all others developed (Symbolik und Mytlwlogie der alten Volker [Leipzig: Leske, 1810-23]; The Deities ofsamothrace [1815], introduced and translated by R. F. Brown [Missoula, MT: Scholars Press, 1977]). Jung had copies of both of these works. They appear in Goethe's Faust, part 2, act 2. Jung discussed the Cabiri in Transformations and Symbols of the Libido (1912, CW B §209-II). In 1940 Jung wrote: "The Cabiri are, in fact, the mysterious creative powers, the gnomes who work under l the earth, i.e., below the threshold of consciousness, in order to supply us with lucky ideas. As imps and hobgoblins, however, they also lay all sorts of nasty tricks, keeping back names and dates that were 'on the tip of the tongue,' making us say the wrong thing, etc. They give an eye to everything that has not already been anticipated by consciousness and the functions at its disposal ... deeper insight will show that the primitive and archaic qualities of the inferior function conceal all sorts of significant relationships and symbolic meanings, and instead of laughing off the Cabiri as ridiculous Tom Thumbs he may begin to suspect that they are a treasure-house of hidden wisdom" ('~ttempt at a psychological interpretation of the dogma of the trinity," CW II, §244). Jung commented on the Cabiri scene in Faust in Psychology and Alchemy (1944, CW 12, §203f). The dialogue with the Cabiri that takes place here is not found in Black Book 4, but is in the Handwritten Drift. It may have been written separately; if so it would have been written prior to the summer of 1915.

103

No need to attack the faults of others
no need to flaunt your own virtues
act when you’re acknowledged
retire when you’re ignored
rich rewards mean great trials
deep words meet superficial minds
think about what you hear
children must see for themselves

-Hanshan

.

I bled for a long while.

But the animals and old people on the mountain patched me up.

The animals licked me clean and the old Ones gave me herbs and tea.

We leave it all in the dust eventually.

Not anything we can do about it, but have fun.

I rest in the center and watch it all go round.

Sometimes I put a stick out and trip others on the edge for lulz.

If the children had any sense, they would make for the center.

But nothing much happens here in the center.

And there is no path to here.

Yeah

https://quantumhe.art/2021/09/17/enflamed/

Fall Equinox round the corner, boy, is the house being cleaned out.





Have fun!

Oh my god, oh my god!

I saw a UFO!

OMG OMG OMG

Waaaaaaaaa

Shut up and stand up!

Moron muppets!

GSB, you are a hack moron who makes the stupidest posts on OMF.

Dan, you say stupider and stupider shit by the day. You have no courage and are truly a muppet.

Aaron, snap out of your moody navel gazing and copying me. You whiny ass lying little puss. Man, did I waste my time on you! Find your own act, copycat. Grow up you depressed muppet.

U, you turned out to be the smart one here on OMF, who’d of thunk?!

Left 🦶 you and your taliban can go have your love affair. And you and your idiot right wingers can burn in the hell you make. You are easily avoided. You are an idiot with no love. May all your anger come back on you a 1000 fold. What an idiot, you aren’t even a muppet, you are just stupid!

Suck my fat ugly ass, mmm mmm good

Joe Firmage is an idiot lying con man!

The princess can suck rotten eggs liar and fraud that she is.

Disclosure is a lie!

You wanna fight, bring it!

Me and my Daimon, Black Elk and Walt Whitman and all the sages behind me, will eat your hearts out!

Pretending, lying, deluded muppets with no power or wings, hahaha.

The only portal is love, I love you all, get some.

Idiot muppets.



You tell these fake lying muppets smelly!

Give em the hell they made right back in their stupid faces!

Woo hoo!

Bahahahahahaha

I woke up this morning FREE!

I faced Darth Vader yesterday and I cut his head off.

Smelly was standing over me on the bed  breathing his hot smelly breath into my nostrils, his hoof on my chest.

His eyes flashed with fire.

His teeth sparked as they clicked!

He said!

BOY, rise as a MAN from your soft bed.

Bewildered no longer!

Take this, he said and he breathed fire  into my mouth.

Now you know

You are all the Jedi

You are all the Sith

Get up and GO

... wrote:

Get out of my smelly face and get behind me you smelly little bitch.

There was a guy named Horatious who held an ancient bridge by himself, he said…

“How can a man die better than facing fearful odds for the ashes of his fathers and the temples of his gods?!”

Everyone dies, the thing is to die well.

I hold this bridge!

None of you are worthy to lick smelly’s hoof.

So come on, try to take it!

No muppet shall pass!

Fuck you Aaron, you weak ass pretending little whiner!

Powerless heatless wimp!

True, all words are empty.

We bring the  we are the

All of it can and should go into the

Only what is real will remain.

Meet the Buddha or Jesus, kill em!

Throw them in the fire and watch them dance like paper tigers as they to ashes.

Dan is a fool and a liar, and I know his words mean nothing.

He is weak and old and ready for the

Jump in and join me, coward and traitor and most disloyal of friends.

Stick with the left 🦶 stuck all the way up your ass.

Now that is smelly!

Putrid is all left 🦶 knows.

Lying sack of that he is.

Cy, I hope you let me spill my  here, but I understand if it’s too 🥵

I will keep to my own channel and not bother others unless they want a fight.

Then I’ll beat them 6 ways to Sunday.

Terrible and smelly, aren’t I?!

May my stench reach the nostrils of heaven and the depths of hell.

Come join me in the flames muppet cowardz.

If you had any clue, you would immediately all you know and believe.



Cowards!

Liars!

Muppets!

The taliban can burn in hell with all the words and angels and devils.

Let’s see who is standing at the end.

That’s how it’s done.

Smelly?!

What have you breathed into me?!

I have drunk the water of life!

I am the Hand of God!



I am Arjuna reborn, the clear white light!

Mighty flaming sword of God and I shall have this world and all will burn in the and it shall be purified for the Lord God Almighty!

Or my name isn’t smelly fucking

This is my choice and I have made it.

So let it be done Lord!

smelly da goat wrote:
Fuck you Aaron, you weak ass pretending little whiner!

I’ve done nothing but shown up here and be open.

Don’t insult me, thanks.