Triple Truth in Tiantai Doctrine

Phenomena are empty of self-nature.
Phenomena exist from a worldly perspective.
Phenomena are both empty of existence and exist provisionally at once

- Tiantai doctrine (via Nagarjuna).

Retrieved from http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tiantai



http://www.thepresentparticiple.blogspot.com

My Own Minor 419 Eater Skype Victory

After reading about the 419 Eater group online last year when they forced a Nigerian internet scam to video the whole Monty Python Dead Parrot sketch (which I've linked below), I decided that every time I receive spam like that I'd have a play in return.  I always do it from a designated hotmail address so I don't let them know that my actual accounts are active, but this time, I couldn't help myself when a faux-teen chanteuse was trying to spruik me on Skype.

http://www.thepresentparticiple.blogspot.com

Judith Pickering on Love in the face of Otherness

"Inklings of intuitive insight disappear when we attempt to over-define and reify.  Insight is often a case of very subtle realignments in our understanding.  It might be seeing a situation in a more symbolic, less literal or concrete way.  We slip off the mark by creating false dichotomies or conflating two aspects of truth which although interdependent are not one.  Non-duality is not the same as monism.  To say we are relational rather than isolates is not to say we are fused and inseparable.  The search for truth as an attempt to uncover another's reality under our projections does not deny their inscrutable alterity.  The Buddhist concept of non-self (anatman) does not meant that we have no self and the all is nothing, but it refers to the absence of a permanent, autonomous, persisting, unchanging ego.  The Buddhist concept of sunyata likewise does not mean simply emptiness in a nihilistic sense but empty of false selfhood.  Bion's no-thing is not nothingness but an apprehension of the latent plentitude of the void of O.  Non-attachment does not mean a schizoid detachment or disengagement from loving relations.  It means freedom from a possessive self-centered clinging to an object of desire.

Our relations with eachother are all interdependent.  So are the terms we use in the attempt to express this.  We need to discovers a language of subtle distinctions that more finely discern the different and varied forms of love, and so may better catch their respective truths and more accurately gesture towards the ultimate.  Can we say love exists as a thing in itself, without lovers loving, or without the daily contingencies of interpersonal experience?  Love exists in the particular circumstances of loving which entail lovers relating as both beloved and lover, where the subjectivity of each is created anew in each encounter, ever seeking to be known and ever eluding definition.  Love, alterity, exogamy and intersubjectivity can only accurately be understood in terms of interdependent relationships with each other.  Alterity becomes meaningless and a form of philosophical dualism if we overemphasize radical Otherness such that no engagement or connection to another is possible.  Exogamy incorporates the notion of becoming more fully ourselves in a love which is understood as intersubjective, and which recognises and respects the paradox of communion and alterity, epistemophillia and opacity".

From Judith Pickering's Being in Love: Therapeutic Pathways Through Psychological Obstacles to Love.

If I Owned a Café...

I'd have a menu with Berocca and Hairy Lemon next to the Virgin Marys. I'd have solid iron, flat Chinese tea pots. When the jazz trio were taking a break, I'd stream springtime folk music and sing along. With a tongue firmly planted in my cheek, I'd master Italian inflections on each of the coffee names, embarrassing the zits off my blessed teenagers. You'd love the books that'd line the wall. They'd be organised by life history (an idea I had long before Nick Hornby in High Fidelity) and you'd walk away understanding how I got here just a little more subtly. I'd have all kinds of sweeteners for your tea - raw sugar, stevia, agave and maple syrups, apple juice concentrate and some of that new low-GI blend everyone's talking about. I'd finally own a full range of squeezy bottles - one for chocolate, one for honey, passionfruit sauce, egg mayo, hollandaise, bernaise, salsa verde, aioli... I'd have a shrine for Mum, to give her dreams a taste of what her health, fear and circumstance never allowed. I'd import elderflower from England, that Earl Grey from Sri Lanka rich in bergamot orange and Voll Damm from Barcelona. I'd have chess nights, left-bank themed reading groups, hedonistic absinthe-soaked openings for local street artists.. and a great relationship with the local police. My wife and I would sometimes sleep over, hugged in the pride of what we'd accomplished. I'd have large fold down windows to let the ocean air run across the ceiling. I'd make mixtapes, zines and shameless little books of verbose poetry which would come with your bill. I'd size you up and decide which of those three I thought'd suit you best. Advice would be as free for the young as dinner would be for the old. I'd ride a Vespa around our beachside locale, and drum up business with a yarn, wink and a warm handshake. My family and age-old friends would be there, always, and we'd spread out onto the pavement and get old slowly.

Thoughts Sitting Breathing

OM – the pride of perfumed money, music food from China, a place to sit quiet.

MA – How jealous! the million Pentagon myrmidons with dollar billions to spend on Rock & Roll, restaurant high thrones in sky filled with Electric Bombers – Ah! how jealous they are of the thin stomached Vietnamese boy.

NI – Lust in heart for the pink tender prick'd school-boy upstairs bedroom naked with his books, high school locker shower, stretching on the bed, the young guitar player's ass

PA – Impercipience, cat meows natural words at the window, dog barks cheerful morn, cockroach feelers touch the wall, the fly buzzes long long on the sunny windowsill lying upside-down in deathly prayer exhausted, man bends over oblivious books, buds stick forth their heart-tips when ice melts New Year's eve, green grass shoots show 'neath melted snow, screams rise out of thousands of mouths in Hanoi –

DMI – alone the misery, the broken legs of carcrash alcohol; gimme another cigarette, I ain't got a dime for coffee, got no rupee for rice ain't got no land I got hunger in my gland my belly's swollen potatoes my knees got cut on the Tanks –

HUM – the pigs got rocks in their head, C.I.A. Got one eye bloody mind tounge, fiends sold my phonograph TV set to the junkman, Hate that dog that shat my rug, hate Gook Heaven, hate them hippies in Hell stinking Marijuana smog city.

OM – Give it all away, poetry bliss & ready cash for taxicabs, walk Central Park alone & cook your beans in empty silence watching the Worm crawl thru meat walls –

MA – sit down crosslegged and relax; storm Heaven with your mental guns? Give up let Angels alone to play their guitars in Hollywood and drink their Coke-snuff in mountainside bathroom peace –

NI – Light as ashes, love for Neal sublimed into Poesy, love for Peter gone into the Vegetable garden to grow corn & tomatoes –

PA – Dog bark! call the mind gods! Scream happiness in Saigon behind the bar my mother in throes of Police vomit rape! That garbage can I threw in Atlantic Ocean floats over Father Fisheye's sacred grave –

DMI – I forgive thee Cord Meyer secret mind police suborned the Student Congress Cultural Freedom & destroyed Intellect in Academe Columbia Harvard made great murder Indochina War our fantasy-bomb gutted New York's soul –

HUM – Miserable victims flashing knives, Hell's Angels Manson Nixon Calley-Ma, all the cops in the world and their gangster lovers, car salesmen Wall Street brokers smoking in rage over dwindling oil supplies, O poor sick junkies all here's bliss of Buddha-opium, Sacred Emptiness to fix your angry brains –

OM – the Crown of Emptiness, relax the skullcap wove of formal thought, let light escape to Heaven, floating up from hearth thru cranium, free space for Causeless Bliss –

MA – Speech purified, worlds calmed of alcoholic luxury & irritable smoking, jealous fucking rush thru taxicab cities, mental cancer pig war ever machines – Heart through thoat, free space for Causeless Bliss!

NI – How vast, how brightly empty and how old, the breath within the breast expands threefold, the sigh of no restraint, sigh love's release, the rest and peacefulness of sweethearts' ease, from Heart to Heart – free space for Causeless Bliss!

PA – Dog bellies crying happy in the snow, worms share mind's heaviest part, elephants carry Angels whose animal trumpets low from abdomen deep navel up into the heart-free space for Causeless Bliss

DMI – Down in the pecker, the empty piece of wood – Everyone I fucked is dead and gone – everyone I'm gonna fuck is turning to a ghost – All my penis blessedness never'll get lost, but rise from loins & come in my heart – free space for Causeless Bliss

HUM – I shit out my hate through my asshole, My sphincter loosens the void, all hell's legions fall thru space, the Pentagon is destroyed

United States armies march thru the past

The Chinese legions rage

Past the Great Wall of Maya

And scream on the central stage

I loose my bowels of Asia

I move the U.S.A.

I crap on Dharmakaya

And wipe the worlds away

White House filled with fuel gas bombs

Slums with rats' faeces & teeth

All Space is fore-given to Emptiness –

Fro earth to heart, free space

for Causeless Bliss

Allen Ginsberg

January 1, 1973

With God On Our Side - Bob Dylan

Oh my name it is nothin'
My age it means less
The country I come from
Is called the Midwest
I's taught and brought up there
The laws to abide
And that land that I live in
Has God on its side.

Oh the history books tell it
They tell it so well
The cavalries charged
The Indians fell
The cavalries charged
The Indians died
Oh the country was young
With God on its side.

Oh the Spanish-American
War had its day
And the Civil War too
Was soon laid away
And the names of the heroes
I's made to memorize
With guns in their hands
And God on their side.

Oh the First World War, boys
It closed out its fate
The reason for fighting
I never got straight
But I learned to accept it
Accept it with pride
For you don't count the dead
When God's on your side.

When the Second World War
Came to an end
We forgave the Germans
And we were friends
Though they murdered six million
In the ovens they fried
The Germans now too
Have God on their side.

I've learned to hate Russians
All through my whole life
If another war starts
It's them we must fight
To hate them and fear them
To run and to hide
And accept it all bravely
With God on my side.

But now we got weapons
Of the chemical dust
If fire them we're forced to
Then fire them we must
One push of the button
And a shot the world wide
And you never ask questions
When God's on your side.

In a many dark hour
I've been thinkin' about this
That Jesus Christ
Was betrayed by a kiss
But I can't think for you
You'll have to decide
Whether Judas Iscariot
Had God on his side.

So now as I'm leavin'
I'm weary as Hell
The confusion I'm feelin'
Ain't no tongue can tell
The words fill my head
And fall to the floor
If God's on our side
He'll stop the next war.

http://www.thepresentparticiple.blogspot.com

Juvenile Dollar-Mod from Boing Boing

From: http://www.boingboing.net/2009/10/06/juvenile-dollar-mod.html

http://www.thepresentparticiple.blogspot.com