Bodhisattva

“For as long as space endures

And for as long as living beings remain,

Until then may I too abide

To dispel the misery of the world.”

Becoming a Bodhisattva is a huge step in helping not only yourself, but also every other sentient being, both seen and unseen. Most people are self-motivated and work primarily to solve their own problems, keeping others a distant second. Should someone do an act of kindness, repayment is generally expected whether in the form of a thank you and/or further praise.


A Bodhisattva is motivated by pure compassion and love. Their goal is to achieve the highest level of being: that of a Buddha.

Bodhisattva is a Sanskrit term which translates as: Bodhi [enlightenment] and sattva [being]. And their reason for becoming a Buddha is to help others. The Bodhisattva will undergo any type of suffering to help another sentient being, whether a tiny insect or a huge mammal. In Shakyamuni Buddha’s 'Perfection of Wisdom in 8,000 Lines' it states: “I will become a savior to all those beings, I will release them from all their sufferings.” If this sounds familiar to anyone not acquainted with Buddhism, then you only need to think of the example of Jesus Christ, a true Bodhisattva.

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Bodhisattvas in Mahayana Buddhism

In Mahayana Buddhism, a bodhisattva has the compassionate determination to aid all beings on their quest for the highest state of development, full enlightenment of a Buddha. This type of motivation is known as bodhicitta. Remaining in this world of uncontrolled rebirth (samsara), this individual has taken the bodhisattva vows not to pass into nirvana until all other beings have likewise achieved enlightenment.

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The Bodhisattva Ideal - Buddhism and the Aesthetics of Selflessness

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Partial list of bodhisattvas

• Akasagarbha (Ch. 虛空藏　Xu Kong Zang, Jp. Kokuzo)
• Avalokitesvara (Ch. 觀音　Guan Yin, Jp. Kannon, Tib. Chenrezig)
• Ksitigarbha (Ch. 地藏　Di Zang, Jp. Jizo)
• Mahasthamaprapta (Ch. 大勢至 Da Shì Zhì, Jp. Seishi)
• Maitreya (Ch. 彌勒　Mi Le Jp. Miroku)
• Manjusri (Ch. 文殊　Wen Shu, Jp. Monju, Tib. Jampal Yang)
• Padmasambhava (Tib. Padma Jungne or Guru Rinpoche)
• Samantabhadra (Ch. 普賢　Pu Xian, Jp. Fugen, Tib. Kuntu Zangpo)
• Vajrapani (Ch. 金剛手 Jin Gang Shou, Jp.Shukongojin, Tib. Channa Dorje)

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Swami Beyondananda

Swami Asks:
“Do We Go for ABunDance or Stay Stuck in ScareCity?”

By Swami Beyondananda


A great Yogi -- I think it was Yogi Berra -- once said, “When you come to a fork in the road, take it.” Well, here we are at the junction of love and fear, and if we stay on the all-too-familiar path of ScareCity -- we’re totally forked. Yes, in a shrinking world that could definitely use a good shrink, we can do the same old same old and get the same old results, or ... we can try something different for a change. Instead of ScareCity, we can go for ABunDance. That is when we get up off of our assets, move our buns, and dance together in rhythm and flow. Can it work? Well, consider what hasn’t worked.

Goin’ to ScareCity Where It’s Two to One: Two Fears for Every Joy

ScareCity is the way it’s always been. The fear that there isn’t enough to go around has caused us to separate into “people like us” and “people who don’t like us.” No wonder we have nations at odds trying to get even, a dogma-eat-dogma world where misinterpreters have translated great spiritual teachings as “We’re going to heaven, and everyone else can go to hell.” But living at each other’s expense can be expensive. Huge defense budgets, not to mention all the waste and corruption hiding behind defense, are bankrupting the world, financially and morally.

Time to Get Out of ScareCity and Declare ABunDance for All!

Here’s a wild idea: What if we applied our abundant imagination to find ways we can be fruitful and multiply -- instead of staying stuck in fruitless division? What if we came to our senses and declared the current system illegally insane, and committed ourselves to making the world a sane asylum? Sounds crazy? Well, what could be crazier than spending so much of our precious livelihood on weapons of deadlihood? Is it any wonder the ‘hood is so deadly?

Seriously. What if we used our religions wisely and taught those old dogmas some new tricks? What if we decided that we’re not here to earn God’s love, we’re here to spend it? Hey, even Republicans could relate to “supply-side spirituality,” right? What if we changed the game from survival to thrival? What if we went for heaven on earth -- just for the hell of it?

Thermodynamics of Evil

If “good” is defined as whatever encourages integrity – then whatever pulls it apart is evil.

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Here we see a connection between group structural integrity, stability, and what we might call the development of evil. Furthermore, as many have intuited through observation, these connected interactions are a cold yet inherent part of the natural process. A point in case is South African naturalist Lyall Watson, author of the 1997 book: ‘Dark Nature – A Natural History of Evil’. At an early age, through direct study of Zulu and Kung Bushmen, Watson noted the cold precision of predator-killings, interanimal cruelty, and infanticide. From this base, Watson derives the notion that evil involves overstepping bounds or going beyond due measure; where at the heart of evil, as he states, are influences that destroy the integrity of the whole. Here, we refer to this as Type 2 Evil such that going beyond due measure correlates to going beyond the threshold point of maximal structure stability.

"Because of the human craving for stability, especially on the part of those who are in power and who benefit most from the existing order, nothing will give way in the fabric of existing institutions until the strife and discontent build beyond some threshold. The people do not rise up in revolution until their discontent becomes so great that they have no other recourse".

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Overmind and Supermind

At the source of ...Intuition we discover a superconscient cosmic Mind in direct contact with the supramental Truth-Consciousness, an original intensity determinant of all movements below it and all mental energies, -- not Mind as we know it, but an overmind that covers as with the wide wings of some creative Oversoul this whole lower hemisphere of Knowledge-Ignorance, links it with that greater Truth-Consciousness while yet at the same time with its brilliant golden Lid it veils the face of the greater Truth from our sight, intervening with its flood of infinite possibilities as at once an obstacle and a passage in our seeking of the spiritual law of our existence, its highest aim, its secret Reality. This then is the occult link we were looking for; this is the Power that at once connects and divides the supreme Knowledge and the cosmic Ignorance.

"the supermind, the Truth-consciousness, the Real-Idea which knows itself and all that it becomes. "

The Life Divine (10th ed.), , p.128

"Consciousness and Force are the twin essential aspects of the pure Power of existence; Knowledge and Will must therefore be the form which that Power takes in creating a world of relations in the extension of Time and Space. This Knowledge and this Will must be one, infinite, all-embracing, all-possessing, all-forming, holding eternally in itself that which it casts into movement and form. The supermind then is Being moving out into a determinative self-knowledge which perceives certain truths of itself and wills to realise them in a temporal and spatial extension of its own timeless and spaceless existence. Whatever is in its own being, takes form as self-knowledge, as Truth-Consciousness, as Real-Idea, and, that self-knowledge being also self-force, fulfils or realises itself inevitably in Time and Space."

The Life Divine (10th ed.), , p.144

Super Wisdom

Maurice Nicoll: The Sanity of Self-Observation

When a man is totally asleep he is identified with every thought that comes to him automatically and every mood that arises in him automatically, and every feeling. He takes all this as his life and, in fact, more than this, he takes it as his necessary life.

In the work of self-observation we are told in what direction to observe ourselves and the reason for this is to be able to separate ourselves very gradually from all these unnecessary forms of identifying with transient thoughts, moods and feelings. We begin to have something that stands behind us.

"Humanity is regarded as unfinished, incomplete, imperfect. We have the possibility of completing ourselves, perfecting ourselves, and all that is necessary for this lies in us." — Maurice Nicoll

"All our theories of improving the world, while we are still asleep, merely intensify the sleep of humanity." — Maurice Nicoll

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REFLECTIONS (Part 2)
IS THERE AN ANSWER TO
WORLD CONDITIONS TODAY?

The Role of Negative Emotions

“Certainly people make a grave mistake in thinking God controls this Earth. They either get everything in a muddle or become God-haters. But does not the Lord’s Prayer start by saying: ‘May Thy Will be done on Earth’? If mankind were in touch with Higher Centers, it would be a different matter altogether. -— Maurice Nicoll

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Purpose of Life Quotes - 20 SuperWisdoms

1. Only your own enlightened nature knows what is right and best for you. This is why your entire life must revolve around the release of self-light.
Vernon Howard
2. The great use of life is to spend it for something that will outlast it.
William James
3. Be above it! Make the world serve your purpose, but do not serve it.
Johann Wolfgang Von Goethe
4. Your vision will become clear only when you look into your heart ... Who looks outside, dreams. Who looks inside, awakens.
Carl Jung
5. A man without a purpose is like a ship without a rudder.
Thomas Carlyle

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Living Time and the Integration of the Life

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Against False Doctrine

CHAPTER 3: THE RELIGION OF MYSTERY BABYLON

WE NEED TO TAKE A LOOK AT WHAT THE FALSE DOCTRINES OF "MYSTERY BABYLON" ACTUALLY ARE. IN THE NINETEEN HUNDRED YEARS SINCE THE FIRST ADVENT OF JESUS CHRIST, MANY CHRISTIAN CHURCHES HAVE ALMOST LOST THE TRUE TEACHINGS OF JESUS CHRIST AND HAVE SUBSTITUTED THEIR OWN TRADITIONS, DOCTRINES OF MEN, AND SOME OF THE TEACHINGS OF THE ANCIENT RELIGION OF MYSTERY BABYLON. EVEN THE CHURCHES THAT CLAIM TO DERIVE THEIR DOCTRINE DIRECTLY FROM THE BOOK OF ACTS, START OUT CORRECTLY BY GOING RIGHT TO THE WORD OF GOD FOR THEIR BASIS OF FAITH, BUT THEN IMMEDIATELY JUMP RIGHT UP TO 325 AD AND ACCEPT THE ERRORS THAT HAD ALREADY CREPT INTO THE CHURCH AT THAT TIME. THE GOSPEL IN ITS PURITY WAS LOST TO MOST OF THE WORLD SHORTLY AFTER 325 AD. NOTICE, I SAID THE GOSPEL IN IT'S PURITY. I DON'T MEAN TO IMPLY THAT THE GOSPEL WAS LOST, ONLY THAT WHEN THE GOSPEL WAS BEING PREACHED FALSE DOCTRINE WAS ALSO BEING TAUGHT ALONG WITH IT.

Genesis 10:8-10 Cush was the father of Nimrod, who grew to be a mighty warrior on the earth. He was a mighty hunter before the LORD; that is why it is said, "Like Nimrod, a mighty hunter before the LORD." The first centers of his kingdom were Babylon, Erech, Akkad and Clan, in Shinar. (SHINAR IS MODERN DAY IRAQ)

NIMROD'S KINGDOM WAS THE FIRST ATTEMPT BY SATAN AFTER THE FLOOD TO BRING THE WORLD UNDER ONE GOVERNMENT. HE WAS SUCCESSFUL UNTIL GOD STEPPED IN AND CONFUSED THE LANGUAGES AT BABEL. THE BOOK OF JASHER (AN ANCIENT JEWISH HISTORY BOOK) GIVES US SOME MORE INFORMATION ABOUT NIMROD.

Jasher 7:23 & 44-47 And Cush the son of Ham, the son of Noah, took a wife in those days, and she bare a son, and they called his name Nimrod, saying, at that time the sons of men began to rebel and transgress against God. And Nimrod dwelt in Shinar, and he reigned securely, and he fought with his enemies and he subdued them, and he prospered in all his battles, and his kingdom became very great. And Nimrod reigned in the earth over all the sons of Noah, and they were all under his power and counsel. And all of the earth was of one language, but Nimrod did not go in the ways of the Lord, and he was more wicked than all the men that were before him, from the days of the flood until those days. And he made gods of wood and stone, and he bowed down before them, and he rebelled against the lord, and taught all his subjects and the people of the earth his wicked ways. (Nimrod means "Rebel".)

NIMROD LED THE WORLD BACK INTO IDOL WORSHIP AFTER THE FLOOD. ACCORDING TO JOSEPHUS, THE JEWISH HISTORIAN, IT WAS NIMROD WHO CONVINCED THE PEOPLE TO BUILD THE TOWER OF BABEL. THEIR PURPOSE WAS TO BUILD A CITY TOO HIGH TO BE REACHED BY THE WATERS OF ANOTHER FLOOD. THEY ALSO INTENDED TO KILL GOD WHEN THE TOWER REACHED TO HEAVEN, AND PUT THEIR OWN GODS IN HIS PLACE. IDOLATRY, PAYING REVERENCE TO SOMEONE OR SOMETHING OTHER THAN GOD IS THE MAIN THEME OF THE RELIGION OF "MYSTERY BABYLON."

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THE GOSPEL WILL NEVER BE TOTALLY LOST, BUT IT MAY BE OBSCURED BY AND TAUGHT ALONG WITH THE DOCTRINES OF MEN AND DEMONS. THE GATES OF HELL WILL NEVER BE ABLE TO COMPLETELY CONCEAL THE TRUTH, BUT AT TIMES THE DEVIL DOES SEEM TO HAVE THE CHURCH ON THE RUN.

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You're Going Straight to Hell

Betty Bowers' recent offering:

Being America's Best Christian, I have, of course, been exposed to many hours of Christian Music. Being also a woman of exemplary taste, I have never been the one to initiate such an appalling aural subjection. To my mind, so-called Christian Music is too narrowly tailored. It seems to always be touting weak-kneed liberal pap about how Jesus purportedly loves everyone. Well, as any True Christian can tell you, the Lord has told us that the road to Heaven is narrow and while many are called, few are choosen. In other words, it is clearly God's plan that most people should be consigned to an eternity in an imminently disagreeable Hell. Most Christian music, however, ignores a potentially vast audience that needs to hear the "Good News:" That they are going straight to Hell.

To remedy this oversight, I sat down at my Steinway and the Holy Ghost and I wrote a new song (actually, He just pecked out a few arpeggios with His beak): "You're Going Straight To Hell." Now, the vast majority of people who God will ultimately damn can enjoy their speedy descent whistling a tune written just for them!

You're going straight to Hell
Because you don't believe
In my imaginary friend
Who lives in the sky
And truly loves you so!
Well, even though
He is gonna have you tortured when you die

-etc-

Mandala

Early Tibetan Mandalas


Mandala is Sanskrit for circle, polygon, community, connection.
The Mandala is a symbol of man or woman in the world, a support for the meditating person.
The mandala is often illustrated as a palace with four gates, facing the four corners of the Earth.
The Mandala shown here is connected with the Buddha Vajrasattva, who symbolises the original crystalline purity.
In the centre is a lotus blossom with eight petals, resting on a bed of jewels.
In the next place are the walls of the palace with gates towards the four corners of the earth.
The gates are guarded by four angry doorkeepers.
Before the meditating person arrives at the gates, she must, however, pass the four outer circles: the purifying fire of wisdom, the vajra circle, the circle with the eight tombs, the lotus circle.



The Mandala Project includes an on-line gallery to which everyone, regardless of race, gender, location, or beliefs, is invited to submit a personal mandala. The submissions become part of a collective art piece, reflecting the diversity of the human race within a unified structure. Each mandala can include a message from the artist as well as email address to enable viewers to make contact.

The pattern of creation

The word "mandala" is from the classical Indian language of Sanskrit. Loosely translated to mean "circle," a mandala is far more than a simple shape. It represents wholeness, and can be seen as a model for the organizational structure of life itself--a cosmic diagram that reminds us of our relation to the infinite, the world that extends both beyond and within our bodies and minds.

Describing both material and non-material realities, the mandala appears in all aspects of life: the celestial circles we call earth, sun, and moon, as well as conceptual circles of friends, family, and community.

The integrated view of the world represented by the mandala, while long embraced by some Eastern religions, has now begun to emerge in Western religious and secular cultures. Awareness of the mandala may have the potential of changing how we see ourselves, our planet, and perhaps even our own life purpose.

Mandala Project Gallery

Communion

This split of original Christianity into two rival churches (the semi-suppressed mystical versions and the dominant church of the false gospel) fits perfectly with the burgeoning new view, which I maintain, that there are two rival mysticisms: false mysticism/spirituality, which reveres religious experiencing without the crutch of drugs, and true mysticism/spirituality, true religion, which reveres entheogens wholeheartedly and emphatically as the premiere door to heaven, to religious and high philosophical fulfillment. Entheogenic fundamentalism is the belief that those who refuse to eat and drink the sacred plant, which is the flesh of God, condemn themselves to eternal torment, eternal unquenched thirst and unfulfillment, and separation from God.

If the entheogenic plant had not spilled its vital blood for us, we would have no way to be saved, no door to bring us into heaven. Here we have a foundation for the only religious freedom that matters: the freedom to eat God's flesh as he has admonished, and drink his Life-giving blood. If we are permitted to "worship" but only in such a way that we do not consume God's true entheogenic flesh and drink his true entheogenic blood, then there simply is no possibility of any true worship. Worshipping God *is* consuming entheogenic flesh and blood; there is no reason to worship and there is no worship, without consuming this. Strictly speaking, there is only one act that constitutes worship, only one reason to go to church, and that is to consume the body of God which he has given to us for our salvation, saying,

This is my body: Take; Eat; and give praise to the glory of the higher.

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Christians anticipate the return of the messiah. The messiah returns every 10 months, for the 2 month A. Muscaria growing season. The Christs, such as the Greek savior figures in general, are the bringers of entheogen experiencing; they are the personified entheogens and the model of the personal self which results after being fully instructed by the entheogens. I insist that we need the messiah to return to save us. Without the annual return of Entheogen the Messiah riding on the thunder-clouds, we would be eternally in darkness. We are responsible but dependent still on the availability of entheogens. We should not be too proud to eat God's flesh which is given to us for free. It is wrong to consider entheogens as a crutch rather than a gift. Being a responsible individual includes knowing that we are dependent on plant teachers for illumination.

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The Dead Sea Scrolls and the omitted sacred texts all are full of eating and drinking sacred foods and sacred drinks at sacred meals. Heinrich's book proposed that the sacred loaves are ergot cakes, and then Merkur's book proposed the same. Heinrich also proposed that the loaves are A. Muscaria caps.

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All the mental activity and strategies we can think of will not bring us illumination as surely, reliably, quickly, and easily as eating the flesh of God and drinking his divine vital fluid from his nurturing body. Avoiding eating the plant paracletes (helpers who are called for assistance and rescue) would be an avoidance of responsibility, the responsibility of becoming mature and fully developed, spiritually and philosophically. To accept responsibility for spiritual development is to accept the necessity and practicality, the effectiveness, of using plant teachers.

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The Forbidden
Game

We have drunk soma, have become immortal
Gone to the light have we, the gods discovered
What can hostility do against us?

These hymns to a plant deity, as Wasson pointed out in his Soma, were composed over a period of centuries, by men who lived far remote from each other, but shared the same experiences from it;

... In the hierarchy of Vedic gods certain others took precedence over Soma: but since Soma was a tangible, visible thing, its inebriating juice to be ingested by the human organism in the course of the ritual, a god come down and manifesting himself to the Aryans, Soma played a singular role in the Vedic pantheon. The poets never tire of stressing Soma's sensuous appeal... The priests, after imbibing the juice, seem to have known, for the nonce, the ecstasy of existence in the World of the Immortals. The divine element was not just a symbol of spiritual truth as in the Christian communion: Soma was a miraculous drink that spoke for itself.

Suddenly I burst into a vast, new, indescribably wonderful universe. Although I am writing this over a year later, the thrill of the surprise and amazement, the awesomeness of the revelation, the engulfment in an overwhelming feeling-wave of gratitude and blessed wonderment, are as fresh, and the memory of the experience is as vivid, as if it had happened five minutes ago. And yet to concoct anything by way of description that would even hint at the magnitude, the sense of ultimate reality . . . this seems such an impossible task. The knowledge which has infused and affected every aspect of my life came instantaneously and with such complete force of certainty that it was impossible, then or since, to doubt its validity.

Sacred Sex

THE ANSEIRATIC MYSTERIES

Paschal Beverly Randolph is an enigmatic and fascinating figure. A free man of colour born in the state of Virginia in 1825, he was an orator and spokesperson for the Abolitionist cause before the Civil War. He was also a well known spiritualist and trance-medium, and a world-traveller in the best Victorian fashion...

Randolph is thought by some modern authors to have been the fore-runner who paved the way for the ceremonial sex-magic practiced by members of the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn, the Ordo Tempi Orientis, and related groups. His best-known book is the 1874 volume "Eulis! The History of Love: Its Wondrous Magic, Chemistry, Rules, Laws, Modes, Moods and Rationale; Being the Third Revelation of Soul and Sex, also, Reply to 'Why Is Man Immortal?' the Solution to the Darwin Problem, an Entirely New Theory."

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TANTRA, KAREZZA,
and other forms of
SACRED SEX DEFINED

by catherine yronwode

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Tantra (a Sanskrit word which means "woven together") is a term loosely applied to several divergent and even contradictory schools of Hindu yoga in which the sexual union of male and female is worshipped either in principle or in human practice. It has also come to be applied to sex-based religious practices developed in other religions, including Bon, Tibetan Buddhism, Taoism, Christianty, Judaism, and Transcendentalism.

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Sacred Sex links

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"Tantra is that Asian body of beliefs and practices which, working from the principle that the universe we experience is nothing other than the concrete manifestation of the divine energy of the godhead that creates and maintains that universe, seeks to ritually appropriate and channel that energy,within the human microcosm in creative and emancipatory ways."

-David Gordon White

Too many red doors, not enough black paint...

War is Coming

Prepare yourself for the worst it's coming soon

Too many red doors, not enough black paint...
I see those girls walk by dressed in their summer clothes...yeah, I turn my head but the darkness never, ever goes. Everywhere I go I am horrified by everything I see, I am disgusted by what society wants me to want, and sickened to find that I have a secret longing for it deep inside me.

There is something wrong with my brain, I've known it for a long time but as I age it is becoming more and more apparent. It is a toxic concoction of neurochemicals in all the wrong ratios, stirring up thought patterns that don't resemble anything remotely human. I don't even know if prozac can help me anymore, this isn't even a simple depression, but a poisonous obsession with all things disasterous and an almost complete absence of the usual system of rewards that motivates a normal human being to move onwards in society and civilized life.

What I feel, what I want, what I am, it has all warped into something strange and alien. There is something inside me, is it coming out or am I falling in? I can't possibly imagine how I can continue living in my current state of mind, my current situation. Holding my pistol in one hand and a bottle of Jaggermeister in the other, I close my eyes and dive into the black...

posted by thyfleshconsumed at 11:16 PM
While I'm desperately sympathetic to this, I'm compelled to respond with these quotes:

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It's a small world, but I wouldn't want to paint it.
-Steven Wright

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When we remember we are all mad, the mysteries disappear and life stands explained.
—Samuel Langhorne Clemens

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I sincerely hope you work it out.

Dying is Only the Beginning

Dying is not easy. All sensation increases, with sharply heightened sensitivity to sounds and light: ambulance sirens screaming, voices speaking, bumping of your body in the ambulance, the sudden cold and jolts of the exit from the ambulance, lights overhead, drip/infusion bottles clanging and people running and antiseptic hospital scents.

You have the sensation of being fitted into a wet suit that shrinks several sizes as it surrounds you. You get this sense that this is the “new you,” and the moments that you are in this state have a timeless feeling—like it’s an infinitesimal and inestimable length of time all at once. You also will have a very “trippy” realization that you are merely a tiny pinprick of the universe’s enormous consciousness. You genuinely feel like one little itsy-bitsy part of something limitless. Then you’re shot out of this wetsuit at an unimaginable velocity, through its narrowest part, head first, into another even tighter space. It’s like going through a tube of toothpaste the size of a cannon.

Next, you’ll find yourself falling through blackness without the slightest idea of up or down, and going at a ridiculous speed. It’s lonely, scary, dark as black velvet, and endless. Then suddenly the pluses of dying kick in with a kaleidoscope of intense and myriad vibrant color and vibration. You are no longer falling and there is no sound at all, which is really weird. This world of vision is stunningly beautiful and all-enveloping. The exposure to this explosion of color and vibration is enormous enough an event to forget the pain forever, but in real time probably lasts seconds. This whole episode of falling and then witnessing the colors is well-documented by everyone who has had a near-death experience, and has been explained by neurologists as the brain’s chemical reactions to death and trauma. A free trip, in other words. Whether it is biology or spirituality, this is just how it happens every time I die.

Next, you’ll experience what I think is the real moment of death. There are sensations of being surrounded by gentle beings and white light within which are figures that exude comfort, relief, warmth, release, and liberation.

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Buddhasm

Pilgrims flock to see 'Buddha boy' said to have fasted six months
By Thomas Bell in Bara District, Nepal

Thousands of pilgrims are pouring into the dense jungle of southern Nepal to worship a 15-year-old boy who has been hailed as a new Buddha.

Devotees claim that Ram Bomjon, who is silently meditating beneath a tree, has not eaten or drunk anything since he sat down at his chosen spot six months ago.

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Ram Bomjon

Ram Bomjon maintains his vigil in the shade of his pipal tree

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Witnesses say they have seen light emanating from the teenager's forehead.

"It looks a bit like when you shine a torch through your hand," said Tek Bahadur Lama, a member of the committee responsible for dealing with the growing number of visitors from India and elsewhere in Nepal.

"Tell the people not to call me a Buddha. I don't have the Buddha's energy. I am at the level of rinpoche..."

Oracles of Austin Osman Spare

'Alas!' he writes, 'I am morbid,
And have put a purple colour about my brow.
All men scent sating and drinking the
"Joy of the Round Feast," while I am
Melancholy and silent, as though in a
Gloomy wood, astray.
Strange images of myself did I create,
As I gazed into the seeming pit of others,
Losing myself in the thoughtfulness
Of my unreal self, as humanity saw me.
But alas ! on entering to the consciousness
Of my real being to find fostering
ÒThe all-prevailing woman,"
And I strayed with her, into the path direct.
"Hail! the Jewel in the Lotus,"

Austin Osman Spare -age 17

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For, as he himself has said, "Art is that beauty which may be born of anything; but not by a formula of balance and proportion, beauty itself"; and again, "Ugliness is that which the formula does not allow: hence there is never beauty without this ugliness which becomes transmitted by its super-abundance." This is nearer the realisation of the aesthetic values of the "harmony of opposites" or the "union of contrarities," which is the "free belief" of art and conditions of "vital allegory."

Yet again as someone has put it, "every artist who carries furthest his own innermost feelings, and poignantly reveals the intimate impulses of mankind, shocks us as manifest revelations of ourselves." We are affright, as confronted with the scalpel exposed to our disease. For truly are we ever governed by the "complexes" of morality and move continually toward a dream world wherein the ideal balance of mind and matter is stamped with the nature of our evasions. We look to art for mere moments of beauty, modes of escape from reality, achieved by sense of annihilation, which implies too vividly the need for stimulant or sedatives - as Nietzsche puts it, "to make life possible." Yet art has no necessary concern with medicine and morals, though art can be employed in anything, in what are called unholy as more holy means invested with the grace of art - that consumer of antipathies. The "initiate" in this case is he who can accept his grace seasoned with salt. For has not Emerson, in describing the sceptic, acknowledged him, the mystic, who, unafraid to tread the vestibule of the temple, discovers in the Mount of Vision the beautitude is partial and deformed! With such an eye of inward vision did that other philosopher lament:

"I see and have seen worse things; divers things so hideous that I should neither speak of all matters nor even to keep silent about some of them, namely, men who lack everything excepting they have too much of one thing; men who are nothing more than a big eye, a big mouth; or something else big. Reversed cripples I call such men."

"We are such stuff as dreams are made of."
Inadequate expression, conglomeration of half-realised experiences - monsters and mutilated fragments. Mediaeval times more picturesque less squeamish, combined the head of dog and serpent's tail, angels and devils interchange confidence in that grotesquely unsophisticated intermixture of objectivity and subjectivity. Yet whatever the symbols, the function of art remains, the expression of an eternal verity, which, as in the art of Austin Spare, records a disinterested state of mind as the setting free of a disembodied function of the spirit.

Symbology in Aesthetics in Relation to the Art of Austin O. Spare
-Grace Rogers


EARTH: INFERNO

-By Producto Desecho
We are pleased to announce the launch of the long-awaited short film EARTH: INFERNO by Producto Desecho. This is the first film made based upon a work by Spare and we are delighted to make it available in DVD format. With a total running time of 11 minutes, in full colour, the film evokes the strange theatre and sexuality of Spare's first short book. Due to the nudity and sexual references this film has been given a 15 certificate by the British Board of Film Censors.

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Dyslogia

'Touched by tales of babies born in trees, by photographs of upturned faces weeping with despair, relief or resignation, touched by the naked and the destitute, the living, dying and the dead, we in the First World put our hands in our pockets for the Third. Our ministers bicker over whose ministry should pay for sending helicopters but eventually we send them; we send our lifeboats too, and if we thought that the Oxford and Cambridge crews would be of any use, they, the Owl and the Pussycat, would be sent with a pea-green boat to extend the gestures of sympathy and solidarity; and on our television sets, we witness such catastrophe as was seen by Gilgamesh and Noah millenniums ago, salving our consciences with cheques .

'We know nothing of the thirst and hunger, nor the menace of disease from water that has drowned a myriad now-rotting corpses of all kinds; we know nothing of the cramps and stinks as dysentry takes hold and we can only imagine what it is like to feel our children die. And then what?'

(Brian Sewell, Evening Standard 14/3/2000)

'Movie Stars. Sports Stars. Murderers. Tabloid gossip. Pop culture noise is so ever present and overwhelming that it removes the ability in the masses to believe - let alone think about - anything. The inability to read, to contemplate, to consider, is in fact a new epidemic known as dyslogia, a disease caused by the devastating overflow of information.'

'The supranational corporation spreads its doctrine through the trance of the everyday, depriving the psychic slave of instinct and self-protection. Without a sense of self and self-respect, the individual reaches for a placebo in the never-ending array of corporate products. The placebo of 'entertainment' helps to expand the NWO icon of the $. Art police are not required in an environment that convinces the masses that the $ is their leader and sole determinant of behaviour and philosophy.'

Adam Parfrey

'Hell has three doors:

lust, rage and greed.'

Bhagavad-Gita

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'A cry from the North, from the West and from the South
Whence thousands travel daily to the timekept city:
Where My Word is unspoken
In the land of lobelias and tennis flannels
The rabbit shall burrow and the thorn revisit,
The nettle shall flourish on the gravel court,
And the wind shall say: 'Here were decent godless people:
Their only monument the asphalt road
And a thousand lost golf balls'.'

(extract from The Rock, T. S. Eliot)

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Einstein A N D Buddha

T H E P A R A L L E L S A Y I N G S

The parallel sayings are organized by theme and touch upon the nature of matter and energy, the relationship between subject and object, the understanding of time and space, the importance of direct experience, the role of paradox and contradiction in our understanding, the limits of language in describing reality, and the interdependence of all created things. Each section is accompanied by a brief introduction to how these concepts relate to the scientific and spiritual ways of knowing. On each page is an insightful quote from an eminent physicist such as Albert Einstein, Niels Bohr, Erwin Schrödinger, Werner Heisenberg, or David Bohm, together with a surprisingly similar statement from a renown authority of Eastern religion such as the Buddha, Chaung Tzu, the Upanishads, D. T. Suzuki, or the Dalai Lama.

Time and again the passion for understanding has led to the illusion that man is able to comprehend the objective world rationally by pure thought without any empirical foundations in short, by metaphysics.
-Einstein

By becoming attached to names and forms, not realising that they have no more basis than the activities of the mind itself, error rises and the way to emancipation is blocked.
-Buddha

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The Secrets of Alchemy

A Subtle Allegory
concerning the Secrets of Alchemy
very useful to possess
and pleasant to read.

-By Michael Maier

"Accident is a mighty helper; let your hook always be baited; in the least likely river you may catch your fish."

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On the Hermetic Medicine of the Phoenix

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If all the mountains were of silver and gold, what would they profit a man who lives in constant fear of death ? Hence there cannot be in the whole world anything better than our Medicine, which has power to heal all the diseases of the flesh. Wealth, and riches, and gold, all yield the prize to this glorious possession: and whoever does not think so, is not a man, but a beast.

If anyone will not acknowledge the force of reason, he must needs have recourse to authority.

end

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Paradise Lost

A short excerpt of Chapter 6: Entities from Trialogues at the Edge of the West by Ralph Abraham, Terence McKenna and Rupert Sheldrake.

TERENCE: In our culture, we tend to move into cities that push nature away from us. In our mental environment, we do the same thing. Most people live within a very conventionalized set of notions that are deeply imbedded in a larger set of notions. When we go to the physical edges, such as the desert, jungle, and remote and wild nature, and when we go to the mental edges with meditation, dreams, and psychedelics, we discover an extremely rich flora and fauna in the imagination. This realm is ignored because of our tendency to see in words, to build in words, and to turn our backs on the raging ocean of phenomena that would otherwise entirely overwhelm our metaphors.

RUPERT: If we ask what has caused this blindness, we might answer that it's the satanic spirit of science. In the seventeenth century, the spirit of Satan was portrayed in Milton's Paradise Lost, with a whole taxonomy of various demons and fallen angels that acted as malevolent powers, such as Mammon, the demon of commercial greed. The primary sin of Satan and of the other fallen angels like Mammon was pride, the turning away from God toward their own self-sufficiency. This was the beginning of the whole humanist illusion that turned away from the spirit world and declared humans to be self-sufficient. From this point of view, all gods, demons, and spirits are projections of the human mind, creating a kind of anthropocentric universe.

Milton describes Mammon in Paradise Lost:

Even in heaven his looks and thoughts
Were always downward bent, admiring more
The riches of Heaven's pavement, trodden gold,
Than aught divine or holy else enjoyed
In vision beautific: by him first
Men also, and by his suggestion taught,
Ransacked the centre, and with impious hands
Rifled the bowels of their Mother Earth
For treasures better hid.

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"Rebellion to tyrants
is obedience to God."

—Thomas Jefferson

Tryptamine Hallucinogens and Consciousness

--Terence McKenna
It is only the conceit of the scientific and postindustrial societies that allows us to even propound some of the questions that we take to be so important. For instance, the question of contact with extraterrestrials is a kind of red herring premised upon a number of assumptions that a moment's reflection will show are completely false. To search expectantly for a radio signal from an extraterrestrial source is probably as culture bound a presumption as to search the galaxy for a good Italian restaurant. And yet, this has been chosen as the avenue by which it is assumed contact is likely to occur. Meanwhile, there are people all over the world - psychics, shamans, mystics, schizophrenics - whose heads are filled with information, but it has been ruled a priori irrelevant, incoherent, or mad. Only that which is validated through consensus via certain sanctioned instrumentalities will be accepted as a signal. The problem is that we are so inundated by these signals - these other dimensions - that there is a great deal of noise in the circuit.

History is the shockwave of eschatology. Something is at the end of time and is casting an enormous shadow over human history, drawing all human becoming toward it. All the wars, the philosophies, the rapes, the pillaging, the migrations, the cities, the civilizations - all of this is occupying a microsecond of geological, planetary, and galactic time as the monkeys react to the symbiote, which is in the environment and which is feeding information to humanity about the larger picture. I do not belong to the school that wants to attribute all of our accomplishments to knowledge given to us as a gift from friendly aliens - I'm describing something I hope is more profound than that. As nervous systems evolve to higher and higher levels, they come more and more to understand the true situation in which they are embedded, and the true situation in which we are embedded is an organism, an organization of intelligence on a galactic scale. Science and mathematics may be culture-bound. We cannot know for sure, because we have never dealt with an alien mathematics or an alien culture except in the occult realm, and that evidence is inadmissible by the guardians of scientific truth. This means that the contents of shamanic experience and of plant-induced ecstasies are inadmissible even though they are the source of novelty and the cutting edge of the ingression of the novel into the plenum of being.

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The rite is the only religious practice observed by the sectarians. The rite constitutes the Secret. This Secret...is transmitted from generation to generation. The act in itself is trivial, momentary, and requires no description. The Secret is sacred, but is always somewhat ridiculous; its performance is furtive and the adept do not speak of it. There are no decent words to name it, but it is understood that all words name it or rather inevitably allude to it.

The Sect of the Phoenix by Jorge Luis Borges

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We're living in a Matrix ... possibly

Swedish philosopher considers artificial consciousness

A Swedish philosopher (Dr. Nick Bostrom) at Yale University believes there is a one-in-four chance that we are living inside a computer - like the one in movie smash The Matrix.

Bostrom said that civilisation will one day simulate consciousness - if it hasn't already - and then go on to simulate universes for artificial consciousness to inhabit.

"If the last possibility is true, then it could already have happened and we are almost certainly living in a simulation," Dr Bostrom said. He estimated the probability at "about 20-25 per cent".

The Abolition of Work

The anthropologist Marshall Sahlins, surveying the data on contemporary hunter-gatherers, exploded the Hobbesian myth in an article entitled "The Original Affluent Society." They work a lot less than we do, and their work is hard to distinguish from what we regard as play. Sahlins concluded that "hunters and gatherers work less than we do; and, rather than a continuous travail, the food quest is intemmittent, leisure abundant, and there is a greater amount of sleep in the daytime per capita per year than in any other condition of society." They worked an average of four hours a day, assuming they were "working" at all. Their "labor," as it appears to us, was skilled labor which exercised their physical and intellectual capacities; unskilled labor on any large scale, as Sahlins says, is impossible except under industrialism. Thus it satisfied Friedrich Schiller's definition of play, the only occasion on which man realizes his complete humanity by giving full "play" to both sides of his twofold nature, thinking and feeling. As he put it: "The animal works when deprivation is the mainspring of its activity, and it plays when the fullness of its strength is this mainspring, when superabundant life is its own stimulus to activity." (A modern version—dubiously developmental - is Abraham Maslow's counterposition of "deficiency" and "growth" motivation.) Play and freedom are, as regards production, coextensive. Even Marx, who belongs (for all his good intentions) in the productivist pantheon, observed that "the realm of freedom does not commence until the point is passed where labor under the compulsion of necessity and external utility is required." He never could quite bring himself to identify this happy circumstance as what it is, the abolition of work - it's rather anomalous, after all, to be pro-worker and anti-work - but we can.

... It is now possible to abolish work and replace it, insofar as it serves useful purposes, with a multitude of new kinds of activities. To abolish work requires going at it from two directions, quantitative and qualitative. On the one hand, on the quantitative side, we have to cut down massively on the amount of work being done. At present most work is useless or worse and we should simply get rid of it. On the other hand - and I think this the crux of the matter and the revolutionary new departure—we have to take what useful work remains and transform it into a pleasing variety of game-like and craft-like pastimes, indistinguishable from other pleasurable pastimes except that they happen to yield useful end-products. Surely that shouldn't make them less enticing to do. Then all the artificial barriers of power and property could come down. Creation could become recreation. And we could all stop being afraid of each other.

Workers of the world. . . relax

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W weighs in on "...hard work...".-Bonus clip-

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