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

I wrote my last post about the good before I read your last post here.

The good is doing what it does.

We just have to find our union with it.

No one sees perfectly clearly.

We see the shadows, but we can know the light behind them.

This is a big clue about love and the BPW and evil.

Evil isn’t real, it is a misunderstanding of the good.

The BPW is the BPW because we can know the good in each other and in life.

That’s grand if you ask me.

I live by David Bowie’s creed.

He said create while you can, don’t hold back and make a joyful noise before you are gone.

A wise man.

The irrational drives the mob.

Led by the spine and not the mind?

They were probably right to enact control of the mob.

It means democracy and culture is a prison.

Consent is engineered.

So we consume to control us.



They feed desire as a matter of life and death for all.

I think consumerism just turns us into cattle.

The consuming self is a monster.

So the elite do as they like.

Bernays is a good candidate for Satan.

But you can’t control the irrational.

You can only master it or give into it.

Today, the mob, UFOers, Trumpers, New Agers, religious, righties, lefties have lost their minds to the irrational.

Spiritual consumerism is one branch of this irrationalism.

We are being hypernormalized.

So they need to keep people discontent.

I don’t believe in equality myself.

We are not equal.

We all have our unique mix of energies and shadow.

Selfish individualism is a fire and it is surging again today.

Only few still can see this.

We can only watch as the mob burns it all down.

It is a fire that has to burn itself out.

The free market is cruel when it swings back.

The losers are pissed.



As keep making the same mistakes over and over and over.

There is a way out of the madness.

It is a hard way until it is not.

I remain committed to offering my hand to any who wish to take up the work.

Highly recommend.

Been reading this.

Islam has kept the individual in tact and created community.

Destiny Disrupted - The world through Islamic

Destiny Disrupted: A History of the World Through Islamic Eyes https://www.amazon.com/dp/1586488139/ref=cm_sw_r_cp_api_glt_i_748QH5DJD0909PP627P4

I know a little something about Islam...

I stuck the spear into the side of Jesus.

And when I did, I felt my own heart stabbed.

And when I looked up, all I saw was LIGHT!

“I know my fate. One day my name will be associated with the memory of something tremendous — a crisis without equal on earth, the most profound collision of conscience, a decision that was conjured up against everything that had been believed, demanded, hallowed so far. I am no man, I am dynamite.”

—Friedrich Nietzsche, Ecce Homo

“My formula is Amor fati: ... not only to bear up under every necessity, but to love it.”

“Of all that is written, I love only what a person hath written with his blood. Write with blood, and thou wilt find that blood is spirit.”

“Now I go alone, my disciples. You too go now, alone. Thus I want it. Verily, I counsel you: go away from me and resist Zarathustra! And even better: be ashamed of him! Perhaps he deceived you.”

—Friedrich Nietzsche, Thus Spake Zarathustra

We make this meaningful.

We are the myth makers.

https://aeon.co/essays/what-a-spiritual-high-shares-with-a-mental-breakdown

Been there.

Signs everywhere.

But still, just this.

Saw Spider-Man today, new one.

Slow start but ended well.

Really liked it.

We have our darkness and monster inside us.

Some have it contained, others let it roam free, no idea how to work with it.

Me?

I’m not at war with my darkness any longer.

I have let the light into my depths.

I saw more monsters, huge ones, Leviathan, swimming in the depths.

I don’t know how to approach the Leviathan quite yet.

But I feel their pull.

I am only barely at peace with the part of them near the surface.

I’m raw from the decades of struggle with them.

They are legion.

I am weak still and sensitive in some spots, still healing.

Still, it lets me know it’s there.

Those we love, can hurt us most and it’s right there ready to rise up.

We can become embittered by love until we make peace with ourselves.

It takes a great offering to meet it around the ceremonial

We have to offer ourselves.

Not knowing if we will survive the encounter.

This really moves it.

A kind of respect on both sides grows.

Like a vampire though, it still needs to feed.

Love causes pain when we are far from it.

Because you feel there is some great life others have, but not you.

That’s a lie of course.

The monster will say and do anything to escape pain and get what it wants.

Those who govern us now are monsters.

Totally lost in their depths.

The people get the leaders they deserve.

They are just proxies, flawed human beings, like we are.

Close to power, they are all corrupted.

Every one I feel.

Power and authority over others is unnatural.

The strong and ruthless seem best suited for this life sometimes.

Is this the monster’s world?

Trying to take authority over these forces is doomed to fail.

No law can contain the monsters.

Only limit their damage.

I feel more and more, I am the usurper in their domain.

They buck like wild stallions if we try to saddle and break them.

They can be broken, but that is a great tragedy.

We are stronger together we both learn.

I respect the monsters, I do.

My monster was calmed by a smelly

The monster won’t hurt smelly.

It is soothed in smelly’s presence.

I have to still feed it and somehow love it.

Resistance gives it power.

But love soothes it.

What am I do with a goat an a around the same fire?

Have Sunday tea works well.

Love and desire are so closely intertwined.

It is such a balancing act between the love we give and desire we have to take what we want.

But just being with it somehow transforms it into a strange presence in us, you can feel it looking out through your eyes.

Moving as you move.

Feeling what you feel.

I remember in the past, in a previous marriage, how I gave into it and cheated on my wife, justifying it as I went.

There is no care for consequences in the moment of passion.  

The pleasure I felt was powerful, you are swept up in forces you can barely contain.

The monster in us likes to fight the monster in others.

Why is this force a part of us?

We demonize it, try to exorcise it.

But it can’t be removed.

If suppressed, life quickly becomes inauthentic and plastic and empty.

It’s incarnate.

This shadow Carl Jung described so well.

It is irrational, animal.

Dark passenger.

We have struggled with it for a million years and more I’m sure.

Perhaps it grows from childhood.

It is the imaginary friend.

It takes the pain inflicted on us.

Becomes ugly through the pain others cause us and we cause ourselves.

It erupts in our lives when we are weak.

It can lash out in uncontrollable ways.

Trying to defend us perhaps, its only home.

But it just makes a mess of things.

It gets angry for us.

I’ve seen this part of me up close and it isn’t pretty.

But there is something deep under the surface that is beautiful we can reach that somehow makes the difference.

We can’t rip it out of us.

Some kill themselves to avoid it.

Thankfully I faced it and let its force dissipate through many means.

Its strength became my strength.

I think we are all angry in a way.

Some are close to their anger, and most clueless why they do what they do.

When it takes over, where does this calm one go?

It becomes the little child inside, terrified in the corner.

What is happening in the world today seems driven by roving mobs of monsters.

Looking to devour all the want.

Lost in anger, scared and raging.

I suppose it just has to run its course.

It could give us another Holocaust if we don’t band together and dissipate it.

Fighting each other is the wrong move.

That only makes the flames go higher.

Love is what I found tames the beast.

Kindness and compassion transforms this monster back into a small child.

One that becomes a teacher in a way.

Ironic, huh?

Nothing works like love.

The movie showed this like a cartoon, still, I felt the message deeply.

I don’t try to remove it or deny it exists any longer.

But I am certainly also not its master.

It will come close now and not bite and it takes my kindness like milk.

As I am kind to it, I am kind to others and relax more and more with no one to blame for the pain of living.

Life is hard enough without having to fight a monster inside.

I pulled the Judgment card tonight.

“The Light of Truth shines down upon you. You have received a spiritual call and it awakens you. False teachings have fallen away, and the dawn of true understanding and compassion are here. It is a time of enlightenment. Rise and stand.”

I spent the day in conversation with a friend. He encouraged me to keep going. Follow the guide I have uncovered within myself. And so I shall. Now is the time, if not me, then who. If not now, then when.

—

We have lost something through the ages I feel. We wander about in darkness and artificial light imagining ourselves the Lords of Nature. We are terrified of death and we do everything in excess, but I feel we fear the responsibility of truly living most.

Does the world reflect an enlightened people? Far from it. We are on the edge of the Abyss.

Reconsider the ancient Mysteries of Eleusis.

I feel we are rediscovering this now as a counter to killing the God of the modern age.

Know Thyself and do nothing in excess were the ancient admonitions.

We cannot go back, but we can integrate their wisdom into our lives today and forge something new.

I feel we MUST do this.

Excerpts from https://www.academia.edu/22963500/Ritual_Path_of_Initiation_into_the_Eleusinian_Mysteries?email_work_card=title follow.

“The rites  at  Eleusis  were considered  essential  to  the survival  of  humanity,  and  it was  said  that  “the  life  of  the Greeks  [would  be]  unlivable, if  they  were  prevented  from properly  observing  the  most sacred  Mysteries,  which hold  the  whole  human  race together.”

“Aristotle investigated both  what happened  in  the  minds  of  the  audience at  a  tragedy  and  the  experience  offered by  the  annually  recurring  venture  of Eleusis.  The  spectator  at  the  tragedy had  no  need  to  build  up  a  state  of concentration  by  ritual  preparations; he  had  no  need  to  fast,  to  drink  the kykeon  [communion  drink]  and to  march  in  a  procession.  He  did  not attain  a  state  of  epopteia,  of  “having seen”  by  his  own  inner  resources.  The poet,  the  chorus,  the  actors  created  a vision,  the  theama  [spectacle],  for  him at  the  place  designed  for  it,  the  teatron [theatre].  Without  effort  on  his  part, the  spectator  was  transported  into what  he  saw.  What  he  saw  and  heard was  made  easy  for  him  and  became irresistibly  his.  He  came  to  believe  in  it, but  this  belief  was  very  different  from that  aroused  by  the  epopteia  [the  vision of  the  Mysteries].  He  [the  spectator  at the  theatre]  entered  into  other  people’s sufferings,  forgot  himself  and—as Aristotle  stressed—  was  purified.  [But] in  the  Mysteries,  a  purification— katharmos—had  to  take  effect  long before  the  epopteia.”

“Those  seeking  healing   would  prepare  for  a  night   of  dreaming  by  inviting  a visitation  of  divine  presence and  purpose  into  their  lives.”

“The  Homeric  Hymn  to  Demeter  from the  Archaic  Age  (ca.  700-600  BCE)  is our  primary  source  for  the  mythos  which related  the  sacred  drama  of  the  Mother  and Daughter’s  separation  and  reunion.  It  begins with  the  abduction  of  Demeter’s  Daughter by  Hades,  according  to  the  plan  of  Zeus.

‘Lord  Hades,  with  his  deathless horses…  seized  her, Unwilling,  lamenting,  screaming, calling  for  help  from  Her  Father! … The  peaks  of  the  mountains  echoed and  the  depths  of  the  oceans  rang With  the  immortal  voice  of  the Daughter—and  Her  Holy  Mother heard  her!  … Anguish  more  bitter  and  cruel  now struck  the  great  heart  of  Demeter, Her  rage  against  Zeus  erupted,  against the  storm-clouded  Son  of  Kronos. She  abandoned  the  assembly  of  Gods and  heights  of  Mount  Olympos To  live  in  human  cities  and  fields, hiding  her  beauty  for  a  long  time.

And Demeter,  Bestower  of  Seasons  and Bright  Gifts,  would  not  sit  down  on The  glistening  chair,  but  waited unwilling,  her  beautiful   eyes  downcast, ‘til  thoughtful  Iambe  brought  Her   a  low  bench  and  threw  a  silvery fleece  over  it. Sitting  down,  Demeter  drew  Her   veil  across  Her  lovely  face  with   Her  hand, And stayed  there  on  the  bench, grieving  silently,  not  speaking   to  anyone By  a single  word  or  gesture,  unsmiling, tasting  neither  food  nor  drink. She  sat  longing,  consumed  by  desire   for  Her  finely  adorned  Daughter, Until  thoughtful  and  wise  Iambe joked  with  the  holy  Lady, With  bawdy  stories  making  Her   smile,  and  laugh,  and  have  a gracious  heart. And ever  after,  Iambe’s  ribald  humor brought  delight  to  the  Goddess’s  rites.’”

“The  Greek  philosopher  and  public official  Themistios,  a  pagan  and  probable initiate  of  Demeter’s  Mysteries  during  the fourth  century  CE,  wrote  an  essay  “On the  Soul”  which  compared  the  experience of  the  soul  at  the  moment  of  death  to  the experience  of  the  Eleusinian  Mysteries:

‘The  soul  [at  death]  has  the  same experience  as  those  who  are  being initiated  into  great  Mysteries...  at  first one  wanders  and  wearily  hurries  to and  fro,  and  journeys  with  suspicion through  the  dark  as  one  uninitiated: then  come  all  the  terrors  before the  final  initiation,  shuddering, trembling,  sweating,  amazement:  then one  is  struck  with  a  marvelous  light, one  is  received  into  pure  regions  and meadows,  with  voices  and  dances  and the  majesty  of  holy  sounds  and  shapes: among  these  he  who  has  fulfilled initiation  wanders  free,  and  released and  bearing  his  crown  joins  in  the divine  communion, and consorts  with pure  and  holy  men.’”

To thine own self be true.

I have seen the fields of light
I have been touched by golden light
I have run with all my might
I have now taken flight

The Jguy was just another face of Horus.

Who is the face of what?

Mystery



Someone asked me recently, in response to a discussion about the Mysteries, what shall we do now?

This is what sang forth from me…

The people perish with no vision. Help people individuate through multiple techniques. Reboot the mysteries for our post-modern age. Most live in the theatre. Initiation takes work and preparation. The heroic/immortality project is one answer to the existential dread of death. It inspires us. How can we adapt this to our post-modern age? The old religions just ain’t gonna do it. Atheism, nihilism, materialism, humanism just ain’t gonna do it imo. Some groups today have tried to answer this. Jung and Joseph Campbell, Nietzsche and others, offer some big hints. I think it takes a bridge between science and intuition. Philosophy as a way of life can help here. Ultimately, this is a battle between the left and right hemispheres of the brain 🧠 let’s meet in the middle.

Myself?

I have partaken in the mysteries and had the vision and found my voice and I have been filled with fire and light, which has illuminated this shadow world and the shadow that is myself. Some things down there push and look back into you. The profane will not pass. This life is sacred. Every act a ritual movement. A dance. A song. I have been terrified by myself. I am the monster but I am also the child. This is the way. The path of no path along the circle with no beginning and end, a paradox. One does not dabble, one commits all and tastes death before death. You have to put your own head on the block. Pure intention carries you across the abyss. You may come across a spring that never ceases pouring forth living water. I have seen the fields of light and they are beautiful. Surrounded by a black wall. Protected by things unseen and unknown. Who dares make the ascent? Well, the jokers will test you and knock everything out of your hands and squeeze every last idea out of your head until there is only silence, then they may take your head. They will throw it back at your feet, or kick it into oblivion. They may show you how to remove it yourself with a sword impossibly sharp. You want to play with the dark, then know your own. Nature is nature, you don’t bargain, you don’t beg, you offer the only thing you have and love, yourself. That is the ultimate act of worship. You don’t lose anything in this life, you just give it back. Then you will know what to do. Then you will do it. Then you will know and not know. How can you really show someone this? You can’t. How can anyone know what I mean? They can’t. If you open the door, it will never close and you will walk backwards in this world. How can you sell this to people? You can’t. What can you promise someone? Nothing. Who can be convinced to give it all up with no hope of return? No one. You have to go half crazy and then completely. You may lose everything you hold to, every indifferent. So what? Then you will find the real gold. One will do it or they won’t. The one who does, will leave their blood and sweat in the dirt. They will have no choice in the end, but to go all the way. Why would anyone do this? Careful now. I’m crazy Just go live a quiet ordinary life. I have nothing to sell, but doubt, it takes the greatest doubt. What the world needs now, is love, sweet love. How can you give it, if you never find it? Somehow in that depth, at the end of my rope, I found love and now it flows out of me and I can’t stop it. What was the secret incantation?

I cut the rope.

“…and ye shall feast upon the honey of the gods, and be drunk upon the dew of immortality.”

Do not misunderstand me.

I love this world.

It has been my home and shelter.

It is where I found my vision and my voice.

When they punch my ticket
I’ll go gently into the night
But until then
I shall enjoy my flight

Join us.

https://www.sacred-texts.com/oto/418/aetyr1.htm

“The Chymical Wedding is often described as the third of the original manifestos of the mysterious "Fraternity of the Rose Cross" (Rosicrucians).”

“There are three separate realms which are brought through the action of the allegory into a new relationship: the outer world, the every day realm of material embodiment, where we first meet Christian Rosencrantz in his chamber and to which he returns at the end of the story; the realm of the castle of the bride groom, and the island fortress of the tower of Olympus, to which they have to journey in order to bring about the transformation and resurrection.” -pg. 122

“After which the nymphs fell into a ring about, and with a most delicate sweet voice began to sing as follows:

I

Naught better is on earth
Than lovely noble love
Whereby we be as God
And no one vexeth his neighbour.
So let unto the king be sung
That all the sea shall sound.
We ask, and answer ye.

II

What hath to us life brought?
’Tis Love
Who hath brought grace again?
’Tis Love
Whence are we born?
Of Love
How were we all forlorn?
Without Love

III

Who hath us then begotten?
’Twas Love
Wherefore were we suckled?
For Love
What owe we to our elders?
’Tis Love
And why are they so patient?
From Love

IV

What doth all things o’ercome?
’Tis Love
Can we find Love as well?
Through Love
Where letteth a man good work appear?
In Love
Who can unite a twain?
’Tis Love

V

So let us all sing
That it resound
To honour Love
Which will increase
With our lord king and queen,
Their bodies are here, their souls are fled.

VI

And as we live
So shall God give
Where love and grace
Did sunder them
That we with flame of
Love May haply join them up again.

VII

So shall this song
In greatest joy
Though thousand generations come
Return into eternity.”

The Chemical Wedding of Christian Rosenkreutz (Magnum Opus Hermetic Sourceworks Series: No. 18) https://www.amazon.com/dp/0933999356/ref=cm_sw_r_awdo_navT_a_FZQX6Q4HQYSJN6BKH2WB

Lightening doesn’t mourn
It doesn’t cry
It cracks across the sky

Lightening is always free
It cracks the earth
It brings new birth

Lightening doesn’t worry
It wins every race
It jumps across time and space

—smelly da goat

I AM THAT - Nisargadatta Maharaj playlist…

An article/blog post I have been working on…

Walt Whitman and William Blake: Madmen, Artists, Mystics

Walt Whitman is a mystic poet, one of my favorites. One can be transported in the incredible words of Whitman in “Leaves of Grass” and the poem contained within, “Song of Myself.” One can see he was seeing the totality of life and is filled with a glowing Light and great power, as in Blake. Whitman saw everyone as an expression of the whole. Each a work of art. He tried to remind people how beautiful they were. A leaf among the grass.

1

“I celebrate myself, and sing myself,
And what I assume you shall assume,
For every atom belonging to me as good belongs to you.

I loafe and invite my soul,
I lean and loafe at my ease observing a spear of summer grass.

My tongue, every atom of my blood, form’d from this soil, this air,

…

I harbor for good or bad, I permit to speak at every hazard,
Nature without check with original energy.”

https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/45477/song-of-myself-1892-version

Whitman and Blake experienced and saw amazing things in being and themselves as part of the whole. They suffered greatly in life and felt the suffering of others deeply. I could read them forever and barely see where they walked. It is as if the Sun filled them with Light, but also the Shadow clearly speaks through them. Each contains Legion voices. They captured I think what it is to be a Human Being captured between worlds. I am moved deeply by them both.

In “Walt Whitman Speaks,” Whitman says about Blake, “Blake began and ended in Blake.” I researched this and it turns out, Whitman was confounded by and then came to appreciate Blake. Harold Bloom, a great literary critic, felt the two were of the same cloth. The falling of America made Bloom miserable. He would despair about today’s world. I recommend a great book by Bloom who loved Whitman, “The Daemon Knows: Literary Greatness and the American Sublime.” This sublime aspect of Whitman’s time was a presage of our time. Whitman warned us about technology and the age of specialization. Like a hippie version of Ted Kaczynski. Where Ted used real bombs, Whitman used bombs of Love. I love Bloom’s YouTubes. He had a photographic memory and remembered everything he ever read. Amazing to listen to, poetic in his writing and speaking. I highly recommend Bloom.

“Bloom loves Emerson and Whitman but he doesn’t believe them: to him, belatedness is now a permanent condition of man, and there can be no overcoming it—no return, even in America, to an original fullness or freshness or purity of spirit.” —The New Yorker Profile on Bloom - The Prophet of Decline 9/22/02

About Blake, Bloom thought…”The true Romantic, as represented by Shelley and, above all, Blake, looked not to nature—a thing external to the self—to save him but to the world-altering power of his own imagination. Nature was material, and therefore fixed and limiting. Only by struggling to liberate itself from the world entirely—to fill itself with invented mythical forms rather than natural ones—could the imagination be free.” —The New Yorker Profile on Bloom - The Prophet of Decline 9/22/02

The genius of all three of these men drips off their pages and is seen in their art. There is a deep sadness in them all, Bloom the most. Whitman and Blake though saw through the sadness.

Blake invented a form of art combining images with texts, relief etching. The first comics? He had incredible visions. I have a large folio of his work and he strikes me like Jung’s art does in The Red Book. These men have walked through heaven and hell. Whitman wrote, like Blake painted. But Blake’s poetry! My god. Blake was mostly ignored in his time. He said he wrote for his audience in eternity. His visions he felt were real and removed all doubts. Perhaps it was this assurance Whitman didn’t initially like. Blake was a rebel and feared by the establishment. Unlike Swedenborg, Blake spent as much time in the hell of London as the heaven of his soul. For this he has earned my esteem and respect. Whitman felt him dark. But Whitman didn’t like Poe either at first, but in “Walt Whitman Speaks” Whitman comments about writers of his day and confesses he came to like Poe after reading him again and again. He and Blake were so alike, but very different, as Whitman himself wrote.

“Awake! Awake, O sleepers of the land of shadows, wake! expand! I am in you and you in me, mutual in love divine. I am not a God far off, I am a brother and friend; within your own bosoms I reside and you reside in me: Lo! we are one, forgiving all evil, not seeking recompense” (Blake-Jerusalem.,Chp.1,lns.6,18).

Whitman wrote privately after reading Algernon Swinburne’s “William Blake: A Critical Essay”, that while both he and Blake were mystics and “extatics“, the differences between them were vast. I admire Whitman very highly and see in his work a sweet pragmatism that inspires me. How these mystics loved. Whitman took care of civil war wounded and this grew a great compassion in him.  

If you are following the call of your deepest pain and love, one must spend time with Whitman and Blake, both truly sublime and profound.

https://www.gutenberg.org/files/35995/35995-h/35995-h.htm

My article was quite well received.

I feel to write a book on the topic and so I will and my first book of poetry also.

I’m ready.

“That Which is to Give Light Must Endure Burning 🥵”

Some quotes from Viktor Frankl’s “Man’s Search for Meaning” that remind me to endure the 🥵 in life. He lived through the Holocaust. Many on the right want us to forget our ugly history.

No, I won’t forget. I will remember man’s cruelty and hatred towards man. I will not let anger take root in my I will vigilantly pull that anger out of myself anytime it sprouts.

I gladly yield to love.

Love is the way, this is beneath that which is occulted, behind and binding everything.

To receive love is hardest for those who have suffered most.

They have something to show us about what it is to be a Human Being.

—

“Love is the only way to grasp another human being in the innermost core of his personality.

No one can become fully aware of the very essence of another human being unless he loves him.

By his love he is enabled to see the essential traits and features in the beloved person; and even more, he sees that which is potential in him, which is not yet actualized but yet ought to be actualized.

Furthermore, by his love, the loving person enables the beloved person to actualize these potentialities. By making him aware of what he can be and of what he should become, he makes these potentialities come true.”

“Everything can be taken from a man but one thing: the last of the human freedoms—to choose one’s attitude in any given set of circumstances, to choose one’s own way.”

“Ultimately, man should not ask what the meaning of his life is, but rather must recognize that it is he who is asked. In a word, each man is questioned by life; and he can only answer to life by answering for his own life; to life he can only respond by being responsible.”

—smelly da

“This life's dim windows of the soul
Distorts the heavens from pole to pole
And leads you to believe a lie
When you see with, not through, the eye.”

—William Blake

“Fast or slow, the Wheel never stops, and it never retraces its steps, despite rhythmic fractal reflections. The Creation is forever carried along via the Wheel’s interlocking cycles, though at the macrocosmic level nothing ever changes. In Sophiology, this is God’s providence or Pronoia, the gift of seeing forward through time, understanding the cyclic dynamics that mediate the outworking of the Divine Plan. Pronoia refers to God’s “providential koine” expressed as divine governance through what may, at the moment, seem to be chaos.”

—10 The Wheel of Fortune

The keys to immortality.

https://medium.com/practical-rationality/senecas-secret-for-gaining-more-life-30d05401c42d

I’m tellin u, I dreamed about this guy, it was his younger face I saw.

He was a science officer in my dream.

I had never ever seen him or this YouTube channel.

I only know about the CIA from movies.

I had not thought about the CIA or this Ron character in recent memory.

Too much has been happening for me to interpret it any other way.

I want to share a bit about my favorite poet, Walt Whitman, a representative of the great American sublime. He embodied the true spirt of Philosophy as a way of life to me. He took care of wounded civil war soldiers and saw the birth of our modern industrial age and had a warning for the age of specialization.

"He sets me free in a flood of light."

He said my philosophy includes all philosophy. I think Walt was one of the wisest men to ever live. He also shared a great love for the Stoic Epictetus, as I do. He has inspired my own poetry. Of all the modern Philosophers and poets and sages, Walt embodies most what I have come to as well. A fellow traveller on the open road. Alan Ginsberg and Jack Kerouac, the great beet poets, also loved Walt. Walt inspired the 60s hippies and he has wise words for us today I feel.

I highly recommend his incomparable book of poetry, Leaves of Grass. https://www.amazon.com/Leaves-Grass-Original-Walt-Whitman/dp/1945644273

"The last thing the world needs is a cut and dried philosophy, and that last man to announce a cut and dried philosophy would be Walt Whitman. Why, boy, there's just the secret of it—which you have always so well grasped: including all philosophies, as I do, how could I nail myself to any one, or single specimen—except it be this, only—that my philosophy is to include all other philosophies."

“I do not teach a definite Philosophy—I have no cocked and primed system—but I outline, suggest, hint—tell what I see—then each may make up the rest for himself. He who goes to my book expecting a cocked and primed philosophy, will depart utterly disappointed—and deserves to! I find anyhow that a great many of my readers credit my writings with things that do not attach to the writings themselves but to the persons that read them—things they supply, bring with them."

"Epictetus says: “Do not let yourself be wrapt by phantasms”—and we must not: that is very profound: it often comes back to me."

"Epictetus is the one of all my old cronies who has lasted to this day without cutting a diminished figure in my perspective. He belongs with the best—the best of the great teachers—is a universe in himself. He sets me free in a flood of light—of life, of vista."

"My contention is for the whole man—the whole corpus not one member—not a leg, an arm, a belly alone, but the entire corpus, nothing left out of the account. I know it will be argued that the present is the time of specialization, but that don’t answer it.”

—Walt Whitman from “Walt Whitman Speaks”

"Now I see the secret of the making of the best persons,
It is to grow in the open air and to eat and sleep with the earth.
Here a great personal deed has room,
(Such a deed seizes upon the hearts of the whole race of men,
Its effusion of strength and will overwhelms law and mocks all authority and all argument against it.)
Here is the test of wisdom,
Wisdom is not finally tested in schools,
Wisdom cannot be pass’d from one having it to another not having it,
Wisdom is of the soul, is not susceptible of proof, is its own proof,
Applies to all stages and objects and qualities and is content,
Is the certainty of the reality and immortality of things, and the excellence of things;
Something there is in the float of the sight of things that provokes it out of the soul.
Now I re-examine philosophies and religions,
They may prove well in lecture-rooms, yet not prove at all under the spacious clouds and along the landscape and flowing currents.
Here is realization,
Here is a man tallied — he realizes here what he has in him,
The past, the future, majesty, love — if they are vacant of you, you are vacant of them."

--Walt Whitman - From "Song of the Open Road"