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”

This is some great mythopoetic stuff.

http://www.gnosis.org/naghamm/SBJ/King-Iintroduction-SRJ.htm

Pronoia.

Imagine a dreamworld where ensouled beings could live, but could not ascend to the heavens.

They get to haunt our dreams.

Psychic vampires.

I met these beings as a kid.

They terrified me in my dreams.

So one of the upper dudes comes down to the dreamworld and does some psychic magick.

While they are here, they are vulnerable and the rulers of dreamland have a time with them.

The fool is the leader of this dream world.

Hello again to that beast.

I don’t think the fool wants anything to ever leave this world.

So the game begins through the labyrinth.

Down the rabbit hole.

This is so good.

Suddenly the heavens open, a heavenly light shines, and the Savior ap­pears to him in multiple forms. The Savior comforts him and reveals to him the entire nature of the universe. He discloses the completely perfect and utterly transcendent nature of God the Father and describes the ap­pearance of a multitude of divine beings who derive from Him. He explains that first of all appeared Pronoia-Barbelo, the Mother. From her came forth the Son, the divine self-generated Christ (Autogenes). He brought forth four great Lights, each with three androgynous (male and female) pairs of eternal Aeons. The last of the eternal Aeons to appear is called Sophia, whose name in Greek means "wisdom."

She desired to produce a likeness of herself, but acted without the consent of the Father or her male partner (the male side of her aeonic pair). Although her intention was good, she acted in ignorance and as a result her product was an ignorant and evil being, a lion-faced serpent with eyes that flashed fire. This is the creator God of Genesis; his true name is

Yaldabaoth and he is called "the Chief Ruler." Possessing only a soul but not the higher power of the Spirit, Sophia's offspring is arrogant and igno­rant of his own mother. His first act is to steal some of her Spirit in order to create seven minions to serve him along with a host of angels and arch­angels. Yaldabaoth then shapes the world below. Although he uses the Divine Realm as a pattern, the lower world is deficient like its creator.

Enclosed in matter, Adam is temporarily ignorant of his true nature and origin, and becomes subject to passion, suffering, and death.

In order to save humanity from this fate, the divine Mother Pronoia sends down a female savior, the Epinoia of Light, to instruct Adam, en­lightening him about his true nature and the existence of the Divine Realm above. The world rulers dimly perceive her presence within Adam, but they do not understand exactly who and what she is. They foolishly attempt to remove the female savior from Adam surgically, which results in the birth of Eve, who is "bone of his bone and flesh of his flesh." Taking the form of an eagle on the Tree of Knowledge, Epinoia continues to in­struct them both in the true knowledge. But now the world rulers try a new strategy to maintain their domination over the humans; they invent food, wealth, and labor. They rape Eve and attempt to trap humanity with sexual lust. But again they fail, for Adam recognizes his own spiritual es­sence in Eve and their sexual union produces Seth, a child in the image of the true Human. In contrast to the sexual violence and lust of the false world rulers, true sexuality consists in spiritual generation following the pattern of the Divine Realm.

At last Pronoia sends down her own Spirit of Life to instruct humanity. Those souls who receive her Spirit reject the things of this world and cultivate the Spirit within them; those who do not become subject to the counterfeit spirit which binds humanity to the power of the wicked world rulers. They chain people to fate in order to blind them further and lead them into sin and suffering. Rather than despair, however, the Secret Revelation of John offers hope, for in the end all humanity will be saved and brought into the eternal light. After a period of instruction and purifica­tion, each soul will ascend up to the Divine Realm, taking its rightful place in the Aeons of the great Lights. The situation of alienation in the world does not signal hopelessness and nihilism, because salvation awaits all those who recognize the true Spirit within, renounce evil, and grasp the living hope.

When Christ has completed this revelation, he commands John to write it down and pass it on to his fellow spirits. No longer in doubt or sorrow, John immediately goes forth to his fellow disciples and tells them everything the Savior had revealed. With this happy ending, the book closes.

Buried for more than 1500 years, this revelation has now once again come to light. What are we to make of it? The text claims to provide salvation to humanity. But salvation from what? and for what?

Pretty good story, eh?

I bet Gurdjieff had access to this info long before the west. There must have been groups who kept it alive.

Well, let’s keep the good times rollin.

This is Smelly Da Goat, your intrepid reporter of all things sideways.

The world today was a happening.

The insurrectionists are scurrying like rats.

It is a joy to watch them backtrack and scurry.

They thought trump could pull off a revolution and he really tried to do it.

He said, let them all think me a fool, but I will show them.

What was so amazing was how everything I mean everything was a Big Lie.

They used machine learning to lie.

Really shitty low down stuff.

Someone’s gotta do it I guess, better smart greedy fools.

If the Father of lies had a fuck up son, it would gotta be the big orange one.

He showed us alright.

We have Biden sprinting like he has no time left.

We have a financial war raging, and thank god we have a new beachhead against those assholes.

Dan has gone mostly silent.

When he just repeats his points over and over and over, you see that is just a fade.

He won’t talk about the financial revolution under way, he must be entangled.

I continue to marvel at the possible depth of living in the darkest times.

I continue with my own practice and work.

I have been enjoying my writing and art.

About to begin a new cycle with a new medium, bursting to pour myself into some new forms.

Going to do a clay mask series.

There is a new intensity in connections as I have pulled back.

I have found a certain poise in life, a relaxing.

Relaxing is really all of it.

Work hard, then float.

Work hard, then float.

We were made for that cycle.

While the world is losing their minds, keep yours close and close to yours.

While all of this is falling down, I work on the part of the world hopefully looking forward.

People love working on electric vehicles at my company.

I love it.

I can’t believe how it almost is making itself.

So many smart muppets.

Kinda fun to be the ole goat.

I am working better than I ever have through a high touch strategy.

There is just so much to learn and know in the cloud.

I was working on a new supercomputer we run for $35/hr with 96 vCPUS to train machine learning algorithms.

I wish I was a mathematician, would be fun.

I don’t have those gifts or I am too lazy to develop them.

The thing I have found I can do is, lead muppets out of sticky problems through minimum effort.

I am fortunate to have found the place I fit.

That means a lot, its important to individuate from stability and good supply.

It takes great mental effort to think about thinking.

I spend all my free time reading and writing and making videos these days.

I need to take a break and just art and shut the fuck down, recharge the green lantern battery.

If things go well, I might be able to retire in 5 years, but that’s a pipe dream, I’m just a techie slave.

I love working though. Work til ya die I say. Live in a retired way and you miss nothing when death comes for you.

I get to work from home with my pack and fight with my wife.

IT’S AWESOME

I don’t have to go out or go anywhere.

Watch and listen amazing stuff and make a lot of art and love.

Been enjoying much classical and blues, Chopin obsession underway.

We cook and grow much more.

It’s a fun daily cycle when the pack awakens and we all roll out to our work and sleeping.

My wife and I keep wondering if we should get serious about a kid or adopt.

I don’t know, sounds like a big possible bummer dudes.

I think I did all the kids in previous lives

I am a blessed goat, but I worked my ass off too.

As long as they keep their foot off our necks, all good here.

It’s nice to look over the laptop and see everyone in the room, the dogs snoring and the beauty being pretty, tell you dudes, this is my heaven on earth.

I have been enjoying bologna sandwiches, a feast to the poor, like when I was a kid, mmmm mmmm.

It’s a simple life and from such, amazing things are experienced, wondrous moments I wish I could remember forever.

I worked with Alzheimer's patients, Jesus Christ, that’s a cruel end.

Like dying, you don’t know what is happening.

But when you watch someone lose their minds, it effects you deeply.

That’s why I have a special place in my heart for Dan.

Bahahahahahaha

My private universe no one will ever know, my joy.

And if you multiply that by 8 billion others and wow.

That’s whole lotta nothing going on.

We have an outer life and home one.

An outer face and no face within.

No face.

It is astounding how much information we can consume and need to to do our jobs well today.

I might not have a lot of memory, but I am lightening fast when I wanna be.

I’m a plumber really, a remover of obstacles, I am certainly not the smartest, but one who can see amazing detail and stubborn.

I work to remove the obstacles in our collective way as well.

I walk the backwoods and blaze a lonely path, but I was made to do so, so I am whistling these days.

It really is an embarrassment of riches.

How bizarre.

I just find it funny to feel effortless, weightless, in the time of cholera.

Even though I know we are still making carbon, we are giving ourselves a chance.

I feel, to the moment of death, you should be reaching like you have 500 more years.

I love that kinda drive, fucking love it.

Sustained focus.

I span two worlds and the abyss in between.

This is a wonderful life, with all of its absurdity, vulgarity and beauty.

To dare to know is a beginning.

If one is fortunate, they will get their chance.

When it comes, TAKE IT!

Give everything to it, die to it.

Live the fuck out of it and die.

Why would you not live to the best of life given its shortness and beauty?

You would believe what others say a good life is?

No no, you have to get lost in yourself to know yourself and then that’s just knowing, fucking relax dude.

Repeat that as needed.

Fucking relax dude
Fucking relax dude
Fucking relax dude

That’s my smelly goat mantra.

Why would one fall to the BIG LIE?!

Because they are dizzy on the edge of the wheel.

Been there, no thanks.

What this is, I don’t have words for, just useless commentary.

“‘Vision, or imagination,’ writes Blake, ‘is a representation of what actually exists, really and unchangeably. Fable, or allegory, is formed by the daughters of Memory.’ A vision is, that is to say, a perception of the eternal symbols, about which the world is formed, while allegory is a memory of some natural event into which we read a spiritual meaning. In vision the meaning chooses its own symbol by a kind of affinity, while in the case of allegory we choose out some corporeal accident, and build into our memory of it a little vision, for allegory, according to Blake, contains ‘some vision’ always, and lift it up into a personification of a spiritual or natural meaning.”

—W. B. Yeats, The Works of William Blake Vol. 1 307

The best lack all conviction and the worst are full of passionate intensity.

A vast movement out of Spiritus Mundi...

This moment alone is our happiness.

Some interesting bits here that we often speak of here on OMF.

Don't let the title of this video mislead you - there are many gems in the message.  "To make whole, be whole." Such humility and wisdom from this rare soul.

I’ve listened to that guy for years.

He’s funny.

I don’t agree with his faith stuff

So...

Zen Masters, on the other hand, repeatedly refer to religious doctrines and practices as being the same as imaginary eye-spots/flowers small children might chase after after squinting at the sky..

Dismissal by Zen Masters:

It's a waste of effort to grasp dreams, illusions, flowers in the sky. If the mind does not differ, myriad things are one. Since it is not obtained from outside, why cling anymore? You are like goats randomly putting things in your mouth.

Zhaozhou

All the practices and stages of the three vehicles, liberation, bodhisattvas, nirvana, holy virtues, and sanctification are all like flowers in the sky, horns on a rabbit.

Xuansha

One of my fellow students, one Elder Li, saw my late teacher for a year and a half; every time he went in for a personal interview, the teacher would just say to him, "Elder, have you distinguished black and white at all?" Every time he went, this is what happened. How do you interpret talk like this? How do you work?

Nowadays there are no adepts like this helping people. There are no elders who seek like this either. Anyone else would have gotten upset. One day he heard the teacher say in a lecture, "Going in and out the same door—hereditary enemies," and suddenly his previous understanding turned out to be like flowers in the sky, and he now saw the truth.

Foyan
______

Since imaginary sky-flowers were never taken seriously by Zen Masters to begin with, and Buddhism is just another cataract, it's way more accurate to say that if you're not enlightened, you can't read the sutras or meditate without sky-flower obstruction.

Now zen masters also describe jumping back and forth to never never land.

Zen is brutally pragmatic.

A will put anything in its mouth.

Boundless and free
Only contained by thee

Yes, René Guénon is definitely a person of interest.

One of the best bridges between East and West.

Reading and writing and speaking and moving are spiritual exercises.

So is work and everything we do.

Living life sacred brings a joy to it, a fire, a life.

Living it sacred is living it as if nothing is missing, because nothing is missing.

Then you can relax.

Guenon is one who wants to reject anything not under the dome.

He wants to go back.

You can’t.

You want to take care with your words and actions.

They speak of you and what you are.

One knows when their voice has come to them.

It is an intimate conversation and is always sacred.

We are the people who have forgotten what they are.

To read in a sacred way, you must separate yourself Best you can from your own subjective view.

An impossible task, which makes it an existential exercise.

What I have found are a few existential exercises that keep me here and moving straight on.

Mythopoetry is another discovery that helps the mind.

Jesus is used as an image of the perfect sage.

There are many.

We aspire to the sage.

These practices never end.

Spiritual detachment from oneself is an existential practice.

It’s just an act.

This allows one to “undo oneself from the partiality of the individual and impassioned self in order to elevate oneself to the universality of the rational self.”

If wisdom is still alive today, it is only from ones practicing and living philosophy.

Hadot hoped his reader would find a love for “a few old truths”

“Old truths...There are some truths whose meaning will never be exhausted by the generations of man. It is not that they are difficult; on the contrary, they are often extremely simple. Often, they can appear to be banal. Yet for their meaning to be understood, these truths must be lived, and constantly re-experienced. Each generation must take up from scratch, the task of learning to read and to reread these ‘old truths.’”

I feel being one learning to read the “old truths” is part of serving my generation and being here now.

The ego is a pseudo-scientific theory, that does not make it valueless.

Religion and Philosophy can bring a benefit but may not be falsifiable.

“Reason is nothing but reason and satisfies only the rational side of man’s nature, while will is a manifestation of the whole life, that is, of the whole human life including reason and all the impulses. And although our life, in this manifestation of it, is often worthless, yet it is life and not simply extracting square roots. Here I, for instance, quite naturally want to live, in order to satisfy all my capacities for life, and not simply my capacity for reasoning, that is, not simply one twentieth of my capacity for life.”

—Notes from Underground, Fyodor Dostoevsky

Jung first describes the significance of the products of your subconscious. You consciously suppress the importance of your dreams, but they offer you different kinds of information that can be very powerful.

“Dreams may give expression to ineluctable truths, to philosophical pronouncements, illusions, wild fantasies, memories, plans, anticipations, irrational experiences, even telepathic visions, and heaven knows what besides.”

Achievement is a fine goal in early life. As you get older, a deeper spiritual understanding becomes necessary. You don’t need to educate your conscious will. You don’t care about being socially useful anymore. You are now more interested in investigating the meaning of your life, and it would be possible to do so by learning to experience your “own inner being.”

We seem to need difficulty.

But the reality of the inner man is undeniable, and we will need to eventually discover him. We will need to descend into the depths of our psyche and discover that part of us that has contradictory goals to our conscious self and is strange and hostile to us. But do not expect to get rewarded for these efforts by society. Achievement and not personality is rewarded. However, a stronger inner life is the most important precursor to success in the external world.

“Ideas spring from a source that is not contained within one man’s personal life. We do not create them; they create us. Knowledge rests not upon truth alone, but upon error also.”

He criticizes Freud and the modern, rational man for treating the issue of God too frivolously. Jung maintains that even the idea of faith to the modern man is a misconception.

“The strange thing is that man will not learn that God is his father.” That is what Freud would never learn, and what all those who share his outlook forbid themselves to learn. At least, they never find the key to this knowledge. Theology does not help those who are looking for the key, because theology demands faith, and faith cannot be made: it is in the truest sense a gift of grace.

“We have now discovered that it was intellectually unjustified presumption on our forefathers’ part to assume that man has a soul; that that soul has substance, is of divine nature and therefore immortal; that there is a power inherent in it which builds up the body, supports its life, heals its ills and enables the soul to live independently of the body; that there are incorporeal spirits with which the soul associates; and that beyond our empirical present there is a spiritual world from which the soul receives knowledge of spiritual things whose origins cannot be discovered in this visible world.”

Jung shows that while it may have been presumptuous for our ancestors to posit the existence of immaterial souls, our modern interpretation of reality is no less presumptuous. And in fact, the concepts that scientists have created – and all men assume they understand are no less strange or bewildering than ancient ideas about spirituality.

“Every one of us gladly turns away from his problems; if possible, they must not be mentioned, or, better still, their existence denied. We wish to make our lives simple, certain and smooth-and for that reason problems are tabu. We choose to have certainties and no doubts-results and no experiments-without even seeing that certainties can arise only through doubt, and results through experiment.”

Jung emphasizes the importance of challenging ourselves and encountering the unknown. One of his observations is that people who have had to struggle for their existence do not seem to have psychological problems. These are much more common in those who have had a comfortable upbringing. And such problems do not seem to be detectable externally, as it is possible to excel in the external world and yet experience a strained inner life. These problems may relate to sex or inferiority complexes.

However, Jung emphasizes that these complexes need not be so destructive. While they do represent inferiority, they do not necessarily indicate inferiority. They only point to an unresolved conflict, but can be the stimulus you need to exert greater effort, and potentially achieve more than you would have otherwise. In that sense, you wouldn’t want to do away with complexes. If people didn’t have them, psychic life would come to a “fatal standstill.” Complexes indicate “the unresolved problems of the individual, the points at which he has suffered a defeat, at least for the time being, and where there is something he cannot evade or overcome-his weak spots in every sense of the word.”

Doubt and experiment.

Step by step.

Put the stick out there and poke.

Indeed, Jung thinks that the point of life isn’t to resolve every problem, but to embark on an uphill battle. “If it should for once appear that they (problems) are, this is the sign that something has been lost. The meaning and design of a problem seem not to lie in its solution, but in our working at it incessantly.”

As the individual transitions from youth to adulthood, he is given a reality check. His presuppositions about the world are challenged. If “the individual is sufficiently well prepared, the transition to a professional career may take place smoothly. But if he clings to illusions that contradict reality, then problems will surely arise.” The individual may have unrealistic expectations of the future, and a radical underestimation of the difficulties he will face. It may be the case that people who have been given this reality check earlier in life – by being raised in harsh circumstances – are more likely to circumvent delayed disillusionment.

A part of us wants to stay young and remain in our monistic phase – where we can only identify with our ego. This is a narrower level of consciousness of the dualistic stage – where the individual can come to terms with what is alien and strange. He can accept that he has a contradictory nature – his “also I.”

“Whoever protects himself against what is new and strange and thereby regresses to the past, falls into the same neurotic condition as the man who identifies himself with the new and runs away from the past. The only difference is that the one has estranged himself from the past, and the other from the future.”

You can create your own values as a conscious act.

But you don’t create them, Nietzsche was wrong, you rediscover the implicit values within yourself.

That’s the trip.

This is how Jung extended Nietzsche.

—

These quotes are from Modern Man in Search of a Soul by Jung.

“The spirit of the age cannot be compassed by the processes of human reason. It is an inclination, an emotional tendency that works upon weaker minds, through the unconscious, with an overwhelming force of suggestion that carries them along with it. To think otherwise than our contemporaries think is somehow illegitimate and disturbing; it is even indecent, morbid or blasphemous, and therefore socially dangerous for the individual. He is stupidly swimming against the social current. Just as formerly the assumption was unquestionable that everything that exists takes its rise from the creative will of a God who is spirit, so the nineteenth century discovered the equally unquestionable truth that everything arises from material causes. Today the psyche does not build itself a body, but on the contrary, matter, by chemical action, produces the psyche. This reversal of outlook would be ludicrous if it were not one of the outstanding features of the spirit of the age. It is the popular way of thinking, and therefore it is decent, reasonable, scientific and normal. Mind must be thought to be an epiphenomenon of matter. The same conclusion is reached even if we say not "mind" but "psyche", and in place of matter speak of brain, hormones, instincts or drives. To grant the substantiality of the soul or psyche is repugnant to the spirit of the age, for to do so would be heresy.

...

Then he says we were presumptuous. He was arguing against the materialists reducing psyche to biology.

He describes the hard problem debate today, but he does them one better.

He was arguing later, he goes on awhile, that a new way must be forged including the psyche at our base.

The chaotic state precedes getting your shit together.

It’s a deep book.

I have to reread and reread.

In a world of quantity, light on the quality, showing up is half the battle, sticking to it is the other half.

There is the known
And the unknown
And the dragon chaos
That transmutes them

Trump knows people want entertainment more than philosophy.

But the way to know, is to forget.

The way to live, is to die.

But can philosophy be entertaining?

Very much so.

Diogenes shitting, pissing and masturbating in the street is hilarious and some of the best philosophy I ever read

Perhaps one of the most authentic muppets to live.

https://artsandculture.google.com/experiment/play-a-kandinsky/sgF5ivv105ukhA?hl=en

I had a very powerful reaction to this.

Sing songs that none have sung, think thoughts that ne'er in the brain have rung,
Walk in paths that none have trod, weep tears as none have shed for God,
Give peace to all to whom none other gave,
Claim him your own who's everywhere disclaimed.
Love all with love that none have felt and
Brave the battle of life with strength unchained.

Paramahansa Yogananda

He was a good guru.

Now I only know the sage within and it demands my best every moment.

And I give it freely.

Agreed - merely guides and teachers. There have been some great one's for humanity throughout the ages for those who have ears to hear.

Yah, no one is alone, we have some amazing heritage.

And what is amazing is how if it all was lost, all the memories gone, it would naturally arise again from within us.

No one, I mean no one has a corner on this or has exclusive access.

Nature is the filter.

Exercising this capacity and growing it is the work.

It is quite amazing what is inside of us.

These are not religious practices, more like existential practices.

And really inside outside is our dualistic thinking.

It just is what it is.