Lobster

It is easy to sit still, Buddhist Nones/nuns and key monks or Monk keys do it for a living, right? The best way to overcome procrastination is sitting still. All of a sudden anything is more important and has to be done. Drains need cleaning, elderly relatives visiting and e-books need listening. Come to think of it isn’t running a form of meditation? Maybe we should go to the Himalayas to meditate properly? Less distractions? Surely we do not bring the distracted mind with us everywhere? There is no escaping our own thoughts, pah, a likely story! Maybe a nice cup of tea is a form of tea meditation?

And then you sit. You sit because it is your new solution. You sit like you have a poker up your ass. With some droning app. Too tight. So you relax and doze off. You focus on the breathing, to develop your concentrated awareness. The mind has other ideas. Oh the memories, oh the plans for holidays in a meditation retreat. Oh the delightful fantasies of being a Buddha and saving the world. This is your mind? Take it away. Nothing but an internet of cute cats.

Defeat is not an option. It is my mind. I am the master of my destiny. Back to Mx Cushion sitting ... This dear reader is not a mind. It is an explosion in a twaddle factory. It is a minestrone soup with every known shape as pasta and croutons from hell. I will not sit with this idiot pastafarian, I and I. These thoughts, where have they come from? It can not be me, it can not. Away. Away. Holy Mary mother of all that is fine and rosary, pray for us now in our moment of need. Come to think of it Catholicism now there is a fine religion … come to think of it Voodoo/Santería is quite catholic these days. Or dancing with nymphets through the Pagan woods, surely that is more enlightening?

Help.

And you sit and you observe and find out what a mess you are. You are no more insane than the other streaming members of techno society. You help your landlady take out the garbage Mr Anderson. Where is the holy Trinity when you need her? Not even the gods can save us from Mx Cushion. I think I may have taken the wrong pill.

Where is the exit back to the mindless Matrix?

And you sit. You sit to find out the source of this mind possessed by every stray piece of flotsam, TV jingle and media meme. After all we are trying to find our self. To wake up to the real nature of our being. So clearly there must be a soul, a person thinking and imagining and sensing every stray sound from heart beats to coughs. Yet there is not.

Oh the humanity.

Every sense of being, every moment of mindless drivel is dependent on a meal one ate, a song one sang, a memory, a fantasy. The Buddhists call it arisings, dependent origination. There is no self. I need to sit down. Where is Mx Cushion when you need her/hymn ...

I am not a number, I am a person but oh calamity, the person is just a number of arising factors. OK where is the Buddhist PDF reader? Let me check this out. The Buddhas they say, there is no self. Noooo! [screams echo into cyberspace]. Who is that maniac with all the crazy garbage. There must be someone at the centre. A sort of soul. A sort of essential being.

The Awakened Ones, they say no. Oh Buddha and Bodhisattvas!

Dear readers, fellow travelers, sangha and new age wannabes, I am defeated. There must be some mistake. If there is no central I, what can it be that awakes to be a Buddha? Somebody has spiked the ambrosia. Why did no one warn me that being awake was impossible, there is nothing and no one to awake. I feel such a fool or maybe I don’t. Mx Cushion don’t think I have finished with you yet. Gonna sit on your face. Oh I am determined now. Somebody is gonna pay for this mix up, this non event and it is not going to be me because I don’t exist …

… to be discontinued …

Are you aware of the consciousness of child and adult?

Sure?

You should have been through both, with an interlude for the hormone based semi-consciousness of adolescence. What is happening in the search for mind bigger than Marvin the paranoid android? Is a global meme based consensus of awareness emerging in the age of a connected humanity? It has the feel of a hive in cyber-world. Is outsider mentality now part of entertainment for the mainstream cyber-space consumer? Will the requirement for diversity introduce or dull us to potential differences? Is an experiential facet, lacking current means of direct expression emerging independently of altered entheogen induced states? I want a mind I can upgrade and offer memory models and generally have all that Neo and the Matrix offer … Atheism and mechanistic science has found no internal or external evidence of consciousness independent of biological processing.

Surprised? Me not!

Will science expand and perhaps offer new opportunities to those lacking an experience that transcends existing limitations? Or are the intellectual weaklings going to continue a debate with religious bigots, the terminally indoctrinated and others whose spiritual fragility has no place in a mature spirituality.

Parody religions, such as the Church of the Sub genius, the Flying spaghetti monster or my own Cecil the Ultimate Deity (an Open Source deity), rightly ridicule the obsessively infantile, superstitious legacy. There now exists new personal looping, ritual reinforcement of preferred traits used in modern magical methods such as Cognitive Behavioral Therapy, psycho drama etc. Do such methods reinforce the strengths and weakness of a partial development? Do we await the new shaman? The possibility of effecting mind through electro magnetic feedback and other games of science? Oh what fun. The oldest intelligence may be nothing more than a field of awareness. The search for the God particle, beyond the Higgs Field, may reveal that gods exist and this consciousness is amoral or partial, dependent on how it arises and expresses itself. What sort of gods are out there? Well there is us in the future or our trans-human descendants. Humanity will be joining any global, universal and multi-dimensional consciousness it comes into contact with. Well maybe not the Borg. Will humanity have a choice? Human measurement is entangled with our linear development. The scatter brain or attention deficit consciousness evolving in the Internet, is a potential for awareness through integration with a more global networked thinking. Favouring the individual in its relationship to the global social network. I am ready to look for, create or join existing gods. How about you? Gonna stick with Nothing?

Dear Friends of all Sentients

In the magical quantum universe the Universe is alive or at least tangled with a living consciousness. We move towards creating AI and finding ways to create virtual heaven and hells. Who will be allowed into the past to copy the consciousness signal and entangle it into a reality they judge appropriate? As the religious nerds find ways to empower a spiritual singularity, how far beyond infinity will it encompass and merge? At long last humanity will be able to invent a deity transcending its limits. Who will be left to crop circles or remain unplugged to the enlightenment?

OM YA HA HUM though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death I will fear no ignorance for Mindfulness is Present the Sitting and Sangha inspire me

Buddha Nature is present in my hindrances and my thoughts are gone, Metta is activated

Certainty of kindness and generosity shall lead my actions and I will dwell in samsara for all beings

Christian source: Yea, though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death, I will fear no evil: for thou art with me; thy rod and thy staff they comfort me. Thou preparest a table before me in the presence of mine enemies: thou anointest my head with oil; my cup runneth over. Surely goodness and mercy shall follow me all the days of my life: and I will dwell in the house of the Lord for ever.

meanwhile ... https://sufiway.org/teaching/seven-contemplations-on-the-open-path/14-teachings/41-the-art-of-awakening

... and in in a Galaxy Far Far Away ... In the teachings of the triple dorje:

The yidam or deity practice of Cunti/Cundi is part of the Elder/Theravada/Hinyana (Hinyana is considered the smaller tighter teachings used by traditional monks and verified in the oldest existing teachings preceding written records) teachings. It is not well known. https://cundi.weebly.com/cunti.html

Diety practice is done by Christian, atheist, Shingon, secular and other Buddhists including the YinYana. It is a practice that is transformative but in many different ways.

For Example: The Healing practice of the Medicine Buddha and her mantra this is the vajrayana mantra as I was taught it (Tad-ya-ta) Om Be-kan-dze Be-kan-dze Ma-ha Be-kan-dze Ra-dza Sa-mung-ga-te So-ha https://www.wildmind.org/mantras/figures/bhaishajyaguru-medicine-buddha-mantra

Ultra buddhist humour

Never discuss anything you understand. Clothes ... don't forget the clothes! Forget clothes, the more the better. Walk slowly as if permeated with some weighty liquid. Walk fast but not in any direction that can be discerned. If you're a lay person, yearn for ordination. If you're an ordained person, yearn for laicization. Start your own sect. Throw yourself out. Chant softly but audibly in public rest rooms. aaaaahhhhh mmmmmm . . .

If you visit a temple or monastery, make sure to bring home some small tourist treasure to indicate you visited. Hang it prominently, but with humble discretion, in your living room...next to all those books, perhaps.

Donate your books and ornaments to charity. Offer a small, carefully-crafted smile when someone tells you a first-class joke. If someone asks you if you are a Buddhist, consider the question in a dour and somewhat quizzical silence. Deny you are a Buddhist. Yep did that recently when asked outright. Bad crustacean. Treat all beings with equanimity and kindness ... right up until the moment when you can't stand it any more and simply kick the cat. Repent as necessary. Get an invisible cat. mine is called Bast. Train it to kick you. And if all of this strikes you as utterly ludicrous, find a Buddhist practice, practice it and never mind who's a Buddhist and who's not. http://www.katinkahesselink.net/sufi/sufi-jok.html

The Stream Entrant

In Dhammapada verse 178 we read: Sole dominion over the earth, going to heaven, lordship over all worlds: the fruit of stream-entry excels them.

Pretty cool. So who are the stream entry/winners? One will find various alignments, aggrandisements and assertions from ignorance, experience and attainment. As someone who swims up as well as down from the Far Shore, I like to drown in the dharma ocean as much as any fishy character.

To enter the Buddha dharma stream one has to be good. the Sotāpanna stream winner is traditionally incapable of committing the five worst actions 1. Murdering your mother. 2. Murdering your father. 3. Murdering an Arahant. 4. Maliciously injure a Buddha (if you can find her) to the point of drawing blood. 5. Deliberately creating a schism in the monastic community.

So far so good? Maybe the symbolism of mother has a deeper symbolic meaning for you . . . maybe not . . .

The Science of Humour … as if …

In a secular and post theistic society, organisation of transcendental experience moves into the field of science. So for example the knowledge of the future as displayed by prophets is open to analysis. Is it wanting, incomplete or wrong? We may find the practices of ritual, meditation, physical systems such as yoga or qi ong have benefits. Does this mean we have to become speculative masons, chant to our local Llama or stand on our head? Sanity and rationality may provide some truthful insight. Science is sorting it's wheat from chaff. Are the mystics, magickal practitioners, dervishes, gnostics? A spiritual path that enhances our existing qualities and enables and empowers our well being often requires independent efforts. Otherwise we may be confined to partial, bogus or incompetent systems. Sadly that may be the best that is available. That Ain't funny in Kabbalah. It may be that inspirational understanding requires experiences that are closer to arty crafts than the methodical approach. Our balance may reside between the extremes of science and the genuine gnostic. Such an approach can yield a complementary rather than conflicted wisdom. However tempting certainty, order and method is programmed into us, its partial knowledge is representative of the excesses of all confined thinking. Humour is not a science, it may follow or break rules. Altruistic qualities may transcend biological evolution. Dance and music may be expressions that will be difficult for AI to appreciate rather than analyse, quantify and spur wilder forms … There is much in our humanity we can reappraise. A simulation of humanity may have to include capacities that we consider redundant. A transhuman cyborg may need to suffer, die or feel emotions before we abandon the flesh. We may sympathise with the deluded theist or wish for a wider interior life for the convinced atheist. Each may find value in increasing their store of wisdom by being true to their ideals. It is not a question of sides but an invitation to a larger sphere of influences. Shall we leave it to chance?

A visitor said, “Nasrudin some say you are wise and some call you fool, which are you?” “Such questions are easily settled by the toss of a coin but I seem to have spent all my money. Perhaps you can provide the means for an answer?” https://toot.io/@lobster