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”

U wrote:

I’m in the comments already

Good

Zen calls bullshit on all of it.

Flowers in the sky.

I believe Jung and I believe the zen.

A paradox!

A living koan.

Behold, the great doubt.

What happens when the greatest faith meets the greatest doubt, for I have both?!

NOTHING

Abraxas is the dude.

The perfect synthesis.

The dude abides.

If abraxas lived, it would be the dude.

“Everyone is gifted—but some people never open their package.” —Wolfgang Riebe

Alan says this is the greatest thing Jung wrote.

Maybe.

Acceptance of things as they are is the first step.

You can only do this after you accept yourself as you are.

Acceptance of oneself is the acid test of one’s whole outlook on life.

The fiend himself is me.

There is no longer then talk of love.

We rage against ourselves.

Our salvation rests in acceptance of our lowest.

How do you learn to call the wolf your brother?

We must acknowledge the deep significance of our egoism in each other.

It is sacred.

It is our strongest and healthiest power.

Clare Carlisle described the internal and external struggle that every existing individual has to go through. "The struggle between philosophy and existence (often a struggle internal to the individual, especially to the intellectual and perhaps academic individual who is this text’s likely reader) is essential to Kierkegaard’s dramatization of his conflict with Hegel.

Throughout Kierkegaard’s pseudonymous authorship the ‘abstract thinker’, the ‘pitiful professorial figure is criticized from the perspective of the existing individual. Challenging the Hegelian view that the Concept expresses the highest form of truth, texts such as Repetition constitute ‘a polemic against the truth as knowledge’ and suggest instead that truth must be grasped in terms of ‘subjectivity’ or ‘inwardness’."

Both Constantin and the Young Man had the power to act as single individuals instead of trying to become world historically famous or worrying about the crowd but neither of them used the power. They both just pursued the idea. Kierkegaard says of them,

Is it not something to make one shutter in a period of quiet, to make one feel faint in the odd moment-to have power and not know for what purpose one has it! Civil justice keeps watch so that everyone stays within his bounds, so that each individual may serve the whole. When it discovers a man whose power is attracting everyone’s attention, it demands that he explain for what purpose he uses it, and if he is unable to do so, he is suspected of not being a good citizen but perhaps a thug. Human justice is only a semblance of divine justice, which also directs itself to the single individual, and its scrutiny is more rigorous. If it meets a person who, on being asked for what purpose he has his power, can give no other answer than that he himself does not really know, then justice turns out to cast suspicion on him. Perhaps it does not take the power from him, since he may not have misused it yet, but the suspicion becomes an anxiety in his soul that awakens when he least expects it. What does such a person lack? What else but strengthening in the inner being. Three Upbuilding Discourses, Strengthening in the Inner Being, October 16, 1843, from Eighteen Upbuilding Discourses p. 91

Later, in The Concept of Anxiety, Kierkegaard discusses this power again in terms of the eternal.[58] His idea of the eternal is comparable to Nietzsche's idea of eternal return, only backwards. Niels Nymann Eriksen has written about Kierkegaard's category of repetition. This book explores "the Other" and "Becoming" as well as "Recollection" and "Repetition."

“When ideality and reality touch each other then repetition appears. When, for example, I see something in the moment, ideality intervenes and will explain that it is a repetition. Here is the contradiction, for that which is, is also in another mode. That the eternal is, that I can see, but in that same instant I bring it into relation with something else which also is, something that is the same and which will also explain that the other is the same. Here is a redoubling; here this is the question of repetition. Ideality and reality therefore collide.”

Kierkegaard says one must act, not just think about acting.

Constantin addresses his readers. He says,

“My poet now finds legitimation precisely in being absolved by life the moment he in a sense wants to destroy himself. His soul now gains a religious resonance. This is what actually sustains him, although it never attains a breakthrough. His dithyrambic joy in the last letter is an example of this, for beyond a doubt this joy is grounded in a religious mood, which remains something inward, however. He keeps a religious mood as a secret he cannot explain, while at the same time this secret helps him poetically to explain actuality. He explains the universal as repetition, and yet he himself understands repetition in another way, for although actuality becomes the repetition, for him the repetition is the raising of his consciousness to the second power. He has had what essentially belongs to a poet, a love affair, but a very ambivalent one; happy, unhappy, comic, tragic. ... If he had had a deeper religious background, he would not have become a poet. Then everything would have gained religious meaning." Repetition p. 228-230

"Do not look for a sanctuary in anyone except your self." ― Buddha

Foresaperire wrote:

Yah.

I didn’t have to do that.

Looks fun 🤩

Enjoy.

I don’t meditate, I incubated

I actively practiced imagination.

The kid in these vids is a bit on the inexperienced side.

There is the Headless way, which I think is excellent to get a glimpse.

See Peter Kingsley.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Incubation_(ritual)

I do a lot of ritual work, active imagination.

The practice is to stay focused with no head.

Not to be distracted.

You always practice.

It never stops.

We can live in abiding presence.

It’s not mystical, but it seems so.

It’s natural and real.

Frankly, the kid in the vids, doesn’t really know what he is talking about I find.

Interesting topics, not enough wrestling.

Original physicians were philosophers who incubated and healed people taking them into the unconscious.

The Sam talk to me is one of the best on the subject.





To become good at anything takes lots of practice in the context of a lived life.

A skill not earned is just not as valuable, now is it?

To be given it all, would make us empty.

To cultivate a personal practice, a life, is artful and I find satisfying.

I know relaxation and contentment.

I’m not trying to convince anyone.

I’m just here.

I am not seeking techniques, I have my own.

I discovered them naturally, the best way.

I did seek for many years.

You will anger, but you get over it quicker.

Until almost nothing angers you.

Same for ideals and intense desires.

It all relaxes and things just come and go.

Abiding awareness is our natural state.

Meditation takes you no where.

We are already here.

Take er easy and enjoy it.

The cold and breath work is powerful medicine. No need for plant medicine and the swings that accompany its use. The cold and breath only builds, fortifies, and creates resilience. A complete alignment and atonement of body, mind, and spirit. Many have only chosen to focus on building mind and spirit. There is no judgement in the choice to exclude the third, but who's to know what you would have found and experienced if you explored and integrated this as well.

You were the person who posted "the kid" first here. It's inspiring to see someone at his age committed to the work...we need more young people like him. If he is committed to the path we can be sure the wrestling will come at the right time.

The hippies were kids too when they got a glimpse.

But then you have to do the work.

How did they do?

How are we doing?

The kid has interesting topics.

Nothing against the kid.

But he isn’t talking about his experience here.

He will get there, if he does the work.

The work is hard and brutal.

Now James Hillman or Nietzsche or Carl Jung or Pierre Hadot, Pierre Grimes.

Those are some folks to really spend some time with.

Whatever works.

But it all leads here.

The contradictions are flying around this here, where there is no contradiction.

Once you have the message, you can hang up the phone and live in it.

Relaxation and calmness are something too.

Once you are healed, you have to live here.

That’s my practice and art.

And that’s done alone or with a partner, connected to it all.

Anything I could say about this is useless commentary.

Writing about thinking about thinking.

That’s funny and abstract, huh.

And then it all collapses when life unexpectedly knocks you down.

Then the focus kicks in, and you get back up.

And if you did your work well, one might say, mmm mmm good, may I have some more.

https://www.vice.com/en/article/4admym/scientists-achieve-real-time-communication-with-lucid-dreamers-in-breakthrough

Let the adventures begin

“Faced with pain, you will discover the power of endurance. If you are insulted, you will discover patience. In time, you will grow to be confident that there is not a single impression that you will not have the moral means to tolerate.”

—Epictetus

Foresaperire wrote:https://www.vice.com/en/article/4admym/scientists-achieve-real-time-communication-with-lucid-dreamers-in-breakthrough

Let the adventures begin

I’m livin the dream and I lack for nothing

Nis is my dude.

Funny ole man.

Sittin around talkin bout nuthin with a bunch of lunatic white people beggin for an answer.

Livin hilarity.

It’s a waste of time talkin bout nuthin.

Being nuthin, now that’s somethin.

What it is to be!

Part II: Into the shadow - "double platinum purge...on the toilet, puking and diarrhea at the same time."

Feelin that deep swell.

The earth is rolling.

What do you want?

The understanding dawns there is nothing to understand.

Who could help you?

All questions are born out of the answers you have.

UG asks what then is the point of dialogue?

We have to free ourselves from the answers we have.

This is the great reset.

The only one you can control.

We don’t want answers.

What questions do you ask?

Trying to answer questions with no answers is a ritual.

There is great pain involved seeking your answers.

There are no spiritual goals.

Even our spiritual pursuits are material.

When is one done searching?

It’s all the same stuff.

It isn’t possible then to share my experiences with anyone really, is it?

But our reference point is the logos.

Joining with the one seems like it might end this pain to the seeker.

But that is really seeking the ultimate pleasure.

UG doesn’t consider himself an individual.

UG says there is nothing more than words.

I think we have him.

He says there is nothing to live than this.

The BPW is the world we have.

Logos is this, all we know.

Tonight an old rabbi showed up at the fire

I couldn’t sleep.

It was a very productive but chaotic day.

Behold Maimonides.

“Teach thy tongue to say 'I do not know,' and thou shalt progress.“

The Guide for the Perplexed

by Moses Maimonides

https://www.sacred-texts.com/jud/gfp/

MM, a brilliant Hispanic Jewish scholar who lived in Spain and Egypt in the 12th century. In addition to being a philosopher, Maimonides also worked as a medical doctor. My Sephardic ancestors were in Spain around this time.

He chided the literalists. I like this man already. A wise one.

“...if they did not conceive God as having a body possessed of face and limbs, similar to their own in appearance, they would have to deny even the existence of God. The sole difference which they admitted, was that He excelled in greatness and splendour, and that His substance was not flesh and blood. Thus far went their conception of the greatness and glory of God. The incorporeality of the Divine Being, and His unity, in the true sense of the word--for there is no real unity without incorporeality.”

For there is no real unity without incorporeality.

What a strange thing to say.

The images describing god are lies MM says.

He describes religion as a noble lie.

Lying to the people who anthropomorphize god, but at the direction of the clergy as a way to keep them showing up.

Dirty tricks.

MM intrigues me with his authentic directness and honesty.

"Let us make man in our ẓelem" (Gen. i. 26)

“The term ẓelem, on the other hand, signifies the specific form, viz., that which constitutes the essence of a thing, whereby the thing is what it is; the reality of a thing in so far as it is that particular being. In man the "form" is that constituent which gives him human perception: and on account of this intellectual perception the term ẓelem is employed in the sentences "In the ẓelem of God he created him" (Gen. i. 27). It is therefore rightly said, "Thou despisest their ẓelem" (Ps. lxiii. 20); the "contempt" can only concern the soul--the specific form of man, not the properties and shape of his body.”

He is saying we were not made in gods image, but are of the same essence. The Bible was decribing what god looks like, but what is real in its essence.

“Anticipate charity by preventing poverty.“

Wow. Powerful. A Jewish koan.

“You must accept the truth from whatever source it comes.”

“Do not consider it proof just because it is written in books, for a liar who will deceive with his tongue will not hesitate to do the same with his pen.”

“He, however, who begins with Metaphysics, will not only become confused in matters of religion, but will fall into complete infidelity.”

Ha!

Depth in this man.

“Commune with your own heart on your bed and be still.”

“The person who wishes to attain human perfection should study logic first, next mathematics, then physics, and, lastly, metaphysics.”

“And so our rabbis decreed that a man should honor his wife more than himself, and love her as much as he loves himself.”

I don’t do that as well as I could.

He knew trump in his day too.

“He will strive to kill his enemy and to save his own life, but when he finds it impossible to attain his objective, he will devise a scheme whereby they both will be slain.”

Let’s be clear, MM thought Jesus a deceiver and fraud.

He wished his bones be ground to dust.

They felt they had been given a divine calling by the unseen god and then men came to literalize the words.

I get that.

Fun read for the perplexed.

Ofannim

“De Coelesti Hierarchia refers to the Thrones (from the Old Testament description) as the third Order of the first sphere, the other two superior orders being the Cherubim and Seraphim. It is mentioned that "The name of the most glorious and exalted Thrones denotes that which is exempt from and untainted by any base and earthly thing, and the super mundane ascent up the steep. For these have no part in that which is lowest, but dwell in fullest power, immovably and perfectly established in the Most High, and receive the Divine Immanence above all passion and matter, and manifest God, being attentively open to divine participations." This view was also accepted by the Catholic Church and by St Thomas Aquinas.”

...the super mundane ascent up the steep.