my first little twitter-format novel baby

I bring my first attempt at a twitter-format novel (each chapter required to be 140 characters or less, including spaces) from psychopomp to here because I am happy with the way it unfolded in its telling of the tale of East meets West, because I want to see it in its book-like form rather than the inverse form that the blogging format requires, and because I want to share it with a wider audience.

chapter 1
Mountain trail. Sheer drop right. Cliff face left. Wind blasts, shrieking energy threatening footing. Nothing personal. But real.

chapter 2
Around hairpin. Out of wind. Safety. What!? Piercing luminous eyes matching his. No advance. No retreat. Heart thumping fear rage. Impasse.

chapter 3Nietzsche laughed. Ironic bitter joy. Was this his doppelganger, his death twin? His doom and salvation in one package. He moved in.

chapter 4
Japan opens doors. Tesshu leaps through. “Zen warrior relentless openness seeks Prussian intellectual fire.” Fair trade.

chapter 5
2 yamabushi clash. Mountain warriors. Highest peaks of awareness. Alpine thought sword, Fuji no-thought sword. Stand-off. Zanshin.

chapter 6
Thinking! rails Nietzsche. Not-thinking! thunders Tesshu. Swords locked they stand. 1 and 0 in eternal combat.

chapter 7USA. Two bulls. Dakota field. Horns locked, eyes bulging, foreheads bleeding, snot and drool, shit running down back legs. Relentless.

chapter 8No backing up. Sheer cliff face. No backing down. Sheer abyss drop. The two masters see no opening. No way to close.

chapter 9
Alpine clash. An eagle flies down, rests on their immovable X-crossed blades. Without-thinking!, it sighs. Flies away.

chapter 10
"Without-thinking!" the two cogno-warriors simul-shouted, tossing philosoph-swords into abyss. Laughing and pounding each other’s back.

the end
the end

harakido

In Japan, the arts are called do, the Japanese version of tao, or way. An art that one follows is not just a class that one takes, but is regarded as a way, a path, an opening to the mysteries of life. (Do is pronounced "dough.")

Each do is not something you do, as if it is somewhat removed from the "real" you, but is a way of life. What one learns in the dojo (training hall), one applies in all realms of life, in daily existence.

Though I have trained in some of the martial do's (primarily karatedo and judo) and follow the way of the warrior (budo), my primary practice has been and is harakido. Hara (centering). Ki (universal energy). Do (way or path).

Hara-ki-do: the way of centering while opening to universal energy. Condensing while expanding. At all times. Everywhere. No matter where. No matter what. Centering while opening. All of life is one's training hall.

This practice automatically makes one a cosmic citizen. Sensitive and aware while unmoved. Moving while immovable. Highly energized while calm. The inner infinity and the outer infinity are one.

This is the art I practice. This is my do, my path, my way. Harakido.

George reads from "The World's First Ever Baptist Crime Novel"

I read the chapter Preach-Off: Gregor's Sermon. As you may recall, I was lamenting a little over a year ago that Gregor the Demon might not be allowed to preach in a little Baptist church. Well, he was. And he did.

Hell

Hades thought Lucifer an inept strategist to say the least. Lucifer acted on impulsive will and it always backfired. Like the time a fleeing Lucifer led a pursuing Jesus right into Hades' home territory. Jesus crushed the gates of Hell to powder, then liberated all the suffering dead, leaving Hades with worthless real estate, the warden of an empty prison, barren of purpose, no longer blazing with fiery majesty.

Hades had nothing but time, or in another sense, no time at all, since eternity was his scape, his domain. He began populating his realm again. The current crop of brokers, traders, pork-barrelers, adulterers, liars, swindlers, righteous, prosperity peddlers, talk-show hosts, back-biters, fame-seekers, library book hi-liters, and snarky assholes served to populate Hell once again with shrieks and moans and complaints and bitchings and grievous pointless sufferings.

"All kind of a joke," thought Hades, since everyone in Hell was doing it to themselves. "If they only knew, the hell they create for themselves in the body is the same Hell they find here. Everyone follows their love." And this crop, like the batch in the reception hall with its sign, Welcome to Hell, you won't notice the difference, loved their hellish ways.

Both Jesus and Lucifer had disappeared over the far horizon. Everyone was in Hell this time until they released themselves.

fire

I resonate deeply to these quotes from Nietzsche. If you interpret them as referring to the physical plane, you are way off the mark. He is referring to those moving into coherence, the next phase of human consciousness.

If you cannot be saints of knowledge, at least be its warriors. They are the companions and the forerunners of such sainthood.

I see many soldiers: would that I saw many warriors. 'Uniform' one calls what they wear: would that what they thus conceal were not uni-form.

Not to work do I call you but to combat. I call you not to peace but to victory. May your work be a fight, may your peace be a victory. War and courage have accomplished more things than love of one's neighbor. It was not your pity but your courage that so far saved the luckless.

Nietzsche's words remind me of these by Jesus:
I have come to cast fire upon the earth; and how I wish it were already kindled!

We are undergoing a change of consciousness. What was once dismissed as "mystical" is becoming ordinary consciousness. The human species has already moved through four identifiable consciousness structures: archaic, magic, mythical, mental. Now we are opening into integral, which I call coherence.

Only those who are warriors can open and are opening to coherence, can assume their place as citizens of the cosmos. The sheep and the mild and the meek are being left behind, through rigidity and timidity. The maxim still rings true: Let the dead bury the dead!

The Marines have a battle cry: Gung Ho! Everything is thrown into the action, nothing held back. It is no less true for the Spiritual Marine, the Warrior of Spirit.

belief and understanding

Si no credideritis, non intelligetis.
If you do not believe, you will not understand.
--Isaiah 7:9

Belief is not swearing to a creed.
Belief is an energy extended into the unknown.
Belief is investing energetic awareness,
extending one's light of consciousness,
one's purity of heart into an existential domain
for comprehension, for understanding.

By existential domain I mean
a realm of cogno-spiritual sensing, a subtle arena
into which one opens one's soul, one's core of being.
No forethought. No pre-judging.
Quiet simple opening and listening and hearing.

Belief is an extension of you.
Lief: Willing, disposed, pleasing, agreeable/
gladly, willingly, freely/a dear one, a sweetheart, a beloved.
Be Lief. Be willing, be agreeable, be a dear one, a beloved.

If you do not believe, you will not understand.

ronin

Walking in solitude,
weeping my lot,
I take the roads that come,
telling my urgent longings to my only one,
through whom the blessings of my soul increase.
--Garcilaso
(Quoted in
The Collected Works of St. John of the Cross)

Though this could be interpreted as "sad" or as "lonely," it is not so. Nor is "my only one" a human lover. This is the expression of one who walks with God, whose heart and soul are open, vulnerable to the "only one, through whom the blessings of (his) soul increase." Like Enoch of old, he "walks with God and is no more." God, in this case, is not a figment nor an image, but a living breathing reality, the cosmos itself which births us all and which we enliven in return.

In taking "the roads that come," the roads of the cosmos, not the societal highways walked only through rigid corpse-like convention, the ronin is infinitely malleable, shaped through merge with the will and flowing energy of the cosmos itself.

zenbaptist

(Artist unknown -- my title) This photocopy I made from some book years ago has with it the accompanying words --
"Kensho (Experiencing Awareness) The wonderful moment of satori is expressed vividly here; no further comment is called for. Our friend is now in the hand of the Buddha. Each person must experience this for himself, at least once in his life." All you Baptists out there take heed. Spiritual awakening knows no religious bounds.

knight, death, and the devil: albrecht durer (1513)

"Riding steadfastly through a dark Nordic gorge, Dürer's knight rides past Death on a Pale Horse, who holds out an hourglass as a reminder of life's brevity, and is followed closely behind by a pig-snouted Devil. As the embodiment of moral virtue, the rider—modeled on the tradition of heroic equestrian portraits with which Dürer was familiar from Italy—is undistracted and true to his mission."

Warrior of Spirit.

discard

I can tell what day it is by my geezer pill holder. Its writing has worn off but I know that Thursday is the third compartment from the end. Unless I forgot to take my geezer pills yesterday, then yesterday was Thursday and today is Friday. O well. No mind.

I am moving toward following Nietzsche's example: "Now I am shaking off what does not belong to me -- human beings, friends and foes, habits, comforts, books. I now live and will live for years to come in solitude until, fully ripened and ready I may (and then probably must) return to society as a philosopher of Life."

I said moving toward because I am not no Nietzsche (though I do love double negation) and must follow my own unfolding. Not knowing the day of the week is a pretty good start. I will continue endeavoring to persevere in shaking off what does not belong to me.

"Let me keep climbing out of every structure ever made
Not resting in the corpse of days gone by
Let formlessness be my form
No container ever fully holding"
--From Radical Openness

fluid ground

The droplet
at the peak
of the crest
of the wave
of the tsunami
reveres its source
its origin
the shudder
of the Deep.

sub specie aeternitatis

(H)umans have the special capacity to step back and survey themselves, and the lives to which they are committed... Without developing the illusion that they are able to escape from their highly specific and idiosyncratic position, they can view it sub specie aeternitatis—and the view is at once sobering and comical. (Thomas Nagel, The Absurd)

sub specie aeternitatis -- literally, under the aspect of eternity (Merriam-Webster)

From the "highly specific and idiosyncratic" positions I have seen lately, I face the temptation to fall into one of my own, but am unable to, too far gone.

I pray that all humans "without developing the illusion that they are able to escape from their highly specific and idiosyncratic position" can "view it sub specie aeternitatis."

I'm a-tellin' you! The view is definitely both sobering and comical!
And it will save both you and the folk around you a lot of grief.

moving on

We are a person and we are consciousness. We do not become consciousness until we get past being a person, past the ordinary mind, past the mind of constraint with its precarious poise atop the mass of fear and anger and stupor that we claim and insist upon as a human right.

When we are consciousness, person drops away. We open to the rhythms of life with joy, security, and love. This has variously been called "dying before you die," "the twice-born," "laying up your treasures in heaven." I call it going out of your mind.

Just as the fetus moves into and past the stage of fish-ness, so does the budding human move into and past the stage of person-ness. Both fishness and personness remain with us in vestigial form, but now we are consciousness itself.